


Love in Limbo

by TheOldAquarian



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: 6000 Years of Pining (Good Omens), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Banter, Based on the movie Set It Up (2018), Crowley's relationship with his plants is 50 shades of screwed up, Eden prologue, Excessive Drinking, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Humor, Implied Sexual Content, Ineffable Bureaucracy (Good Omens), Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Limbo is a place here and it has a juice bar, Matchmaking, Multi, Romance, Romantic Comedy, Sharing a Bed, They/Them Pronouns for Beelzebub (Good Omens), none of the worldbuilding here is meant to be ontologically or ecologically coherent, the apocalypse but played for laughs, the corporate culture of heaven and hell (is a disaster)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:00:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 26,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23381986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOldAquarian/pseuds/TheOldAquarian
Summary: Aziraphale and Crowley are racing to stop the apocalypse by scheming to get Gabriel and Beelzebub together. It's not going to be easy to spark a romance between an angel and a demon who have seemingly nothing in common, but luckily, falling madly in love with an archenemy is something Aziraphale and Crowley have experience with. If only they could admit it to each other before the end of the world.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens), Beelzebub/Gabriel (Good Omens)
Comments: 305
Kudos: 232
Collections: Good Omens Rom Com Event





	1. Paradise Deflowered

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first part of my story for the Good Omens Rom Com Event, and I owe a huge thanks to everyone who has supported and participated in the GORomCom for being a fantastic and inspiring group of writers, artists, and fans. Special thanks for the prologue goes to [DiminishingReturns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiminishingReturns) and her eternal enthusiasm for all things floral.
> 
> You don't need to see Set It Up before reading this, but you should anyway because it's a good laugh. As always, my deepest apologies to John Milton.
> 
> Updates have been wonky. We're getting there.

The Garden of Eden was carpeted with flowers, teeming with new-birthed blooms. They were fragrant, and lovely, and contemplating a class-action suit against the angels who had planted them there.

Really, it had been past enduring. Since being channeled from the eddies of divinity into the first trickles of tangible life, they had been plucked, pinched, and pulverized by all manner of earthly creatures. All very well for the lion to doze peacefully beside the lamb, but such harmony between the beasts was little solace to the flowers of Eden. It was insulting no matter whether they were trampled by hoof, paw, or heel. 

Or, as was often the case, whether they were unceremoniously slithered upon by an enormous snake with an irritating habit of humming to himself.

When Eve ripped out blooms to tuck behind her ear, the flowers speculated about whether excessive adornment could be reclassified as a cardinal sin.[1] When the world’s first weapon[2] singed them with sparks from its burning blade, they considered reporting a breach of protocol. And when they were rhythmically squashed by the winged backs of an angel and a demon discovering some of the more acute joys of physical existence, the flowers began to wonder if it was not too late to exchange their terrestrial posts for something more removed from the sordid traffic of the world. Perhaps the Almighty Gardener would consider replanting them among the clouds? 

Unfortunately for the flowers, Heaven has never been known for the flexibility of its return policy. 

“Oh dear me, I think we’ve flattened the peonies.” 

There was a fluttering of enormous wings, followed by the ejection of stray stems and petals from snowy white plumage.

“Oh, yeah, might have done,” Crawly replied. He reached for a black robe lying several feet away. 

Aziraphale plucked a lily and started nervously denuding it of petals. 

“Erm, Crawly, you’ve really been quite lovely, but I’m beginning to think that perhaps we’ve got ourselves into a rather dangerous predicament.” He averted his eyes from the demon dressing with a modesty that had been lying comatose for the last month.

“Did they send you a portent? Have you got another assignment?” Crawly had not yet learned to make his eyes look remotely human, but he could make them unreadable when it served him.

“No,” Aziraphale admitted. He tore another petal from the lily and began to shred it.

“Come on, stop that, you’re ripping apart the poor flower,” Crawly protested.[3]

“Crawly, don’t you think we may have been rushing things a bit?”

“I dunno, there haven’t been many weeks yet,” Crawly said, climbing into Aziraphale’s lap and pressing a warm kiss to the curve of his jaw. “Bit hard to say.”

The peonies shuddered with renewed dread.

A month ago things in Eden had gone off the rails, spoiled by a bad apple as surely as the proverbial bunch. Day one saw the introduction of rain and leaf-based fashion, and the leavetaking of humanity without so much as an insincere promise of postcards. The snake sulked; the angel anticipated.

  
  


On day three Aziraphale decided to stop waiting atop the wall, since after all Heaven was perfectly capable of knocking and there was, surely, no harm in being a bit more comfortable on the soft grass.

  
  


“Want to see if these are any good?” Crawly asked on day four, holding a hastily-burnished apple. 

“No, of course not!” Aziraphale exclaimed. “What sort of angel do you take me for, you fiend?”

Crawly shrugged. "The sort of angel who’s stuck in the overgrown backyard of existence without anything to do.”

  
  


On day five Aziraphale took the inventory of every living thing in Eden. He recounted again in the evening for fear of leaving out a miniscule soul somewhere in the top of the tree leaves or the bottom of the clear ponds. Crawly said nothing, but followed him taking rather exaggerated bites of an apple.

  
  


On day six Aziraphale and Crowley shared the world’s first fruit salad.

  
  


The world’s first apple-seed-spitting contest was held on the seventh day.

  
  


“They will come looking for us, you know,” Aziraphale said on the ninth day. “They haven’t forgotten. They can’t have.”

Crawly slithered into a tighter coil and did not answer.

  
  


On the tenth day they named all the animals in the grass and among the trees.[4] On the eleventh day they named the fish and the scuttling shelled creatures in the streams.

  
  


On day twelve a nest of robins hatched, shrieking blind and hungry into the world. 

  
  


They took to star-watching on the fourteenth day.

“I helped make some of these, you know,” Crawly said. His voice was soft like the summer night.

“So did I,” Aziraphale replied. “Perhaps we--well, I suppose it’s useless to speculate.”

“I don’t think so. I think I’d remember you.”

Aziraphale shifted as though he’d taken hold of something unexpectedly heavy. “You know, oddly enough, I think I also helped make snakes. I always thought they were rather splendid creatures." He shook his head. "What a funny world it’s turned out to be.”

Crawly, who was in the habit of keeping his eyes wide open by default, managed to stare just a little bit more.[5]

  
  


On day sixteen, as they were inexpertly skipping stones across the gleaming water, Aziraphale handed Crawly a flat red rock. Their fingers brushed for a moment that appeared and departed as quick as a darting dragonfly.

  
  


“What is Hell like?” Aziraphale asked very quietly, looking at the waning crescent of the moon on the nineteenth day.

Crawly’s eyes remained fixed on an impossibly distant star.

“It’s sort of like a long, wet cough that you can’t soothe, and you can’t get out of your throat. But with paperwork.”

  
  


They picked blackberries on the twentieth day. When they reached at once for the same bramble, their fingers tangled. This time the moment lingered, sweet and dark as the sun-warmed fruit they were seeking.

  
  


“What’s it like in Heaven nowadays?” Crawly asked on day twenty-one.

“Oh it’s beautiful,” Aziraphale said at once. “Quite magnificent, really.” 

He gave the smallest of squirms. “Only you can’t eat anything. And there aren’t any butterflies.”

  
  


On the twenty-fifth day, Crawly attempted to show Aziraphale how to nap in the sunlight, which was the single greatest pleasure of his life.

  
  


The twenty-sixth day saw them seated side-by-side on a night thick with fireflies, breathing air scented like loam and lilacs.

“Can I kiss you?” Crawly asked, sudden and desperate. His eyes gleamed like the gold of false idols.

Idol worship had yet to be classified as a significant risk factor for immorality.

“Please, do,” Aziraphale breathed.

  
  


By the morning of the twenty-seventh day, sunlit naps were no longer the greatest pleasure of Crawly’s life.

  
  


On the twenty-eighth day, they flattened the zinnias.

  
  


On the twenty-ninth day, they crushed the snapdragons.[6]

  
  


On the thirtieth day, they squashed the peonies. Through the haze of divine (and diabolical) bliss, Aziraphale began to worry.

On the thirty-first day, Heaven and Hell finally caught up to them, though neither caught _on_ to them.

Heaven's messenger arrived first, in a lightning flash from the vaulted, cloudless blue. Aziraphale had hardly opened his mouth to tell Crawly to hide when he saw a gleaming tail disappear into the orchard. The Archangel Gabriel appeared on Earth, looking equally resplendent and harried.

"Aziraphale! Buddy, so sorry about leaving you hanging. Been a PR disaster ever since that apple business and I've been working my wings off trying to get the prophets to stay on message. Total nightmare. Never work with prophets, cherubim, or demons, that's my advice."

"Gabriel, so good to see you!" Aziraphale dropped the apple core he was holding behind his back and willed it not to thud. “I’m sorry to hear things have been difficult.”

“So,” Gabriel gestured with one gigantic wing, “what have you been doing here? As your supervisor I apologize for not providing you with an appropriate workload. Let me tell you, it’ll be a lot more efficient from here on out.”

"Me? Oh, I’ve been finding ways to fill the time, you know. I’ve inventoried everything in Eden. Twice.”

Aziraphale had lied to the indistinct face of God shortly after the Fall of Man, so really, it should hardly matter that he skimmed over the details when reporting to his supervisor. Shouldn’t it?

“Gosh, you must have been bored. Well, let’s get you back to Heaven for a debriefing and some clean clothes. You’re all covered in grass stains, looks like you were sucker punched by a meadow.” Gabriel shook his head not unfondly.

“Right, yes, one moment.” Aziraphale hesitated, then withdrew the shredded lily from the pocket of his robe and laid it gently on a prominent rock.

In another flash of lightning the two angels were gone.

From behind the apple tree, Crawly uncoiled. His tongue flickered at the sky, as though to taste the last vestiges of departing divinity.

Beside him, the ground bubbled like a cauldron full of diced iniquities. He rapidly reacquired limbs.

“Crawly, you’re zztill here,” Beelzebub said, stepping forward from the gash in the earth.

“Erm, yeah, didn’t really want to go off-script, you know, hadn’t got any messages.”

Beelzebub scowled. “We told you to make trouble, why didn’t you come back once it wazz made?”

Crawly’s instinct was to wrap his tail tight across his face, but in that moment the gesture was unavailable to him.

“Oh I didn’t realize trouble was supposed to be a determinate-quantity thing. Thought troublemaking was more of an ongoing state.”

Beelzebub’s geometric eyes glittered. “Well, you mizzed the party we all had to zelebrate your victory with the apple. Don’t exzpect the employee appreciation committee to throw you another.”

“Shame, that.” Crawly’s eyes were roaming the garden, and alighted on the torn lily.

“Let’zz get back to Hell, you have fourteen reportzz due.”

“Right, one moment.” Crawly picked up the ravaged flower, and then made a show of looking around for stray belongings before nodding to Beelzebub.

The ground yawned, or perhaps silently screamed, and the demons descended in a gush of soil and sulphur.

Across the abandoned Garden, the flowers respired a sigh of relief, feeling secure at last. (They did not think of the future, and could never have anticipated the indignity of boutonnieres, or the the methodical cruelty of lawn mowers.)

Six thousand years later, when the world was ending, Aziraphale and Crowley found themselves once again on an unanticipated vacation.

Footnotes

1 When Savonarola tried the same thing in ages hence, Uriel instructed Heaven’s communications team to consult the infamous Flowerbed Files for a response with a suitable amount of waffle and tact.  [return to text ]

2 And second ostentatious accessory, after Archangel Gabriel’s cloak pin  [return to text ]

3 At this, the blooms of Eden took heart. Here, at last, was a creature who showed some kindness and mercy to the poor plants of this world.  [return to text ]

4 “What about Ariel?” Aziraphale asked, gently holding a slug whose regular oozing routine he had just interrupted.

“Nope,” Crawly said. “We already named the anteater Ariel.”

“Oh dear, I’d forgotten. Alright, er, I’ll call her Slimy.”

“Evocative.”

“Got any better ideas? One single better idea?”  [return to text ]

5 Aziraphale was not, in fact, responsible for snakes, and any fondness for them was developed strictly post-Creation.

He was responsible for fire opals, argon, oysters, and magnolia trees.

Crawly, before he Fell, contributed pyrite, fluorine, grasshoppers, and kelp.  [return to text ]

6 The snapdragons, who were rather naive, guessed they were being crushed by two enormous birds rolling over each other to capture the same twig. The zinnias, observing this misapprehension, mercifully declined to correct it.  [return to text ]


	2. Catering the Apocalypse

It was a chill November day, and the flowers that adorned Bond Street were dead and rotted. One window box alone was blooming, resplendent with inexplicable carnations whose stems remained as stalwart as they had been in the midst of mildest June. They had paid a terrible price for their everlasting beauty. A Faustian bargain, of sorts.

Aziraphale regarded the flowers with vacant admiration as he attempted to summon a demon with a doorbell. A merciless wind snaked through the avenues of Mayfair, but Crowley failed to snake himself to his foyer. Aziraphale sighed, snapped once, and thanked the doorknob for obliging his imposition. 

Inside it was dark and humid, everywhere thoughtfully decorated with appalling wastes of money. Something smelled faintly of potting soil and juniper. Aziraphale stepped through the hall with all the assurance of one for whom the sea itself is just another sidewalk.[7]

He found Crowley lying on his stomach gulping water directly from an unscrewed plant mister and generally looking as though he’d been to hell and back, which, as it happened, he had.

“Erm, hello dear,” Aziraphale ventured. “Had a good time at the office function, then?”

Crowley withdrew from the plant mister with an embarrassed slurp and crumpled a little against a  _ Strelitzia nicolai  _ that started to tremble in its urn ( _ ah,  _ Aziraphale thought, _ that would be the potting soil) _ . 

“Bloody fucking Heaven, shouldna had that eighth sin and tonic” ( _ and that would be the juniper) _ .

“Let’s go to lunch, that will put you to rights.”

“Remind me never to go out with any of my coworkers for Unhappy Hour ever again, no matter who’s paying. I can’t sober up from that rubbish Hell keeps in the liquor cabinets—”[8]

“I  _ did _ remind you,” Aziraphale said, sitting himself upon an armchair that had been stolen from the Victoria and Albert Museum forty years ago. He produced a glass of water from thin air, and, upon a second glance at Crowley’s haggard face, troubled the ether again for two tablets of aspirin.

Crowley gave an anemic wriggle and propelled himself forward to accept the glass of water. Aziraphale watched his throat bob with the effort of swallowing and seemed to suddenly feel the room’s oppressive humidity. Crowley, for his part, appeared to register the fact that his face was very close to the inside of Aziraphale’s knees, and hastened further away.

“I hope you let the car drive you home,” Aziraphale admonished, breaking the layer of quiet that had grown over Crowley’s flat like the skin on cooled soup.

“Oh come on angel, I didn’t take the Bentley, I ripped a great bleeding hole in spacetime like the responsible demon I am.” He gestured to the floor behind him as he stood. It appeared to have melted and subsequently congealed, the crisped rug fluttering uselessly on top like a flake of ash.

“I see.” Aziraphale gave a disapproving wiggle. “This is for you, per our agreement.”

He withdrew a brochure from the cavernous depths of his coat. Cheerful pink script read  _ Francisco’s Flowers and Floral Arrangements _ . 

“Really, Crowley, I do appreciate the favor getting Heaven’s decorations sorted, if perhaps  _ not  _ the claim that I couldn’t tell the difference between a foxglove and an actual fox wearing gloves.”

“Please, you wouldn’t know a morning glory if it tied itself spread-eagled to your trellis and asked you to wallop it with the Saturday crossword. Which”—he added hastily—”isn’t what mine do.”

Aziraphale narrowed his eyes. 

“Well, in any case, the instructions from Michael with respect to the flowers were ‘celebratory’ and ‘tasteful.’ Nothing too showy, nothing too dull, and nothing carnivorous.”

“Likewise, angel, thanks for your help with Hell’s catering.”

Crowley produced a pamphlet from a pocket in his jeans, which hardly seemed capable of producing anything with dimensions greater than the subatomic. The trifold read  _ Yummy Time Events: We’ll Cater Anything. _

Aziraphale’s blush upon taking the brochure wouldn’t have been out of place on a courtier accepting a beribboned token from an imminently jousting lover. It was, however, a little out of place on an angel taking a list of dip platters from a hungover demon.

“Anything in particular the, erm, basement levels would like? Perhaps a couple of cheese plates? Ooh, look, they have petit fours, that will do nicely for dessert...”

“I dunno, I’m not much for food myself,[9] pick whatever you like. Just make it seem like I had a thought or two about it, yeah?”

“Of course, dear. Now how about soaking up some of last night’s mistakes with a bit of buttered toast? I’ve got a meeting with Gabriel at four, so we can’t stay until closing, but I really fancied the mulberry preserves at that little place with the green umbrellas.”

“You always were weak for a green umbrella,” Crowley said with resigned fondness. 

“It’s atmospheric.”

“It’s  _ chintzy. _ ”

Aziraphale’s lips pouted, his eyes beseeched, and his companion gave a heavy, long-suffering sigh and pulled up the directions for the bistro with the green umbrellas.

* * *

As he slowly materialized for his 4 o’ clock meeting, Aziraphale could hear the echo of automated messages.

_ If you have recently died and have questions about your state of being, press 1. For billing and accounts, press 2.  _

_ All prayers will be monitored for quality and training purposes. _

_ Due to a high volume of calls, all our angels are busy assisting other supplicants. Patience is a virtue. _

He stepped forth into a kind of sterile iridescence and made his way to Gabriel’s office, rubbing his neck a little. Ascension to Heaven, if taken too suddenly, produced an uncomfortable sensation along the angelic vertebrae. Angels who commuted on occasion called this “a case of the pearly gate prickles.”

The Archangels occupied suites just beyond the cafeteria (in which four varieties of filtered water were available, all sold as Condensed Cloud™). On the opposite wall hung a large panoramic photo of several million angels emblazoned with script that read  _ The Host With the Most _ .

Gabriel was frowning at his watch and flying rapidly back and forth across his capacious office when Aziraphale knocked. He turned and flashed a luminous smile. On his t-shirt Aziraphale could read  _ Exercise Like You Exorcise. _

“Great to see you Aziraphale, make yourself comfortable.”

There were no chairs in Gabriel’s office—he believed too much furniture was an inducement to Sloth—but Aziraphale tried to stand in a more relaxed manner.

“Are you alright, Gabriel? Pardon me, but you seemed a trifle agitated.”

“Me?  _ Oh, _ the flying. Nah, I’m just trying to get my ten thousands wingbeats a day. Can’t let Michael take the Workplace Wellness Chalice two years in a row, can we?” 

This was, to Gabriel, as Holy a Grail as the one used at Jesus Christ’s most infamous dinner party.

“Ah, quite right. Well, was there something you wanted to discuss?”

“Yup,” Gabriel clapped his hands. “Aziraphale, this is it!”

Aziraphale, who technically had no nationality but was deeply British at heart, only managed to blink and add “Oh it is, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, time for the big one, the last pony ride before lights-out. Set sea to boil, fish skies in the forecast, all that stuff. Judgment Day is at hand! That reminds me, tell Camael on your way out to clear everything from my calendar starting next month, will you?”

Aziraphale passed quickly from astonishment to a state of profound shock, which rapidly stiffened its upper lip and donned the guise of determination. He had, after all, been ready for this. More than fifty years ago, he and Crowley had confessed to each other their mutual apprehensions about Armageddon and come up with a a foolproof plan, which was to think of a foolproof plan once Armageddon was actually announced.[10]

“Erm, next month, you say?”

“Yep, only one more month until the fires of Hell will be extinguished forever. Gosh, it will be so good to clean out that festering cellar. I tell you, Aziraphale, it makes my heart leap just talking about it.”

“Hm.”

“Think of it! A battle unmatched in glory! A light that will outshine the darkness forever! At last the demonic horde will feel Heaven’s blades at their throats!” 

Gabriel paused. Aziraphale, who had never pressed anything to a demon’s throat except some rather insistent kisses, attempted to look appropriately impressed.

“Plus, we won’t have to  _ fax  _ building maintenance forms in triplicate, those guys downstairs really have to update their payment systems.”

“Well,” Aziraphale said, searching for the appropriate remark, “it’ll certainly be something, won’t it?”

“Absolutely. Hey, that’s all I got for this meeting, but I hope you don’t mind coming up to the office a bit more, we’re gonna need every angel to do their part in the coming month. Gotta embrace that team player spirit!”

If the threatened disappearance of nearly everything he loved was not enough to convince Aziraphale that Armageddon must be avoided at all costs, the invocation of Team Player Spirit most definitely was.

* * *

As the escalator descended, the stench of Hell grew unbearable. It was like the horrible midpoint of gangrenous flesh and artificial banana flavor, and it was one of the reasons Crowley miracled his clothes rather than shoplifting them. Try getting  _ that  _ out of a fine angora.

_ Press 9 to report mistreatment by a member of our staff. Press 10 to report a particularly memorable mistreatment by a member of our staff to the Employee Appreciation Committee. _

_ You have reached the Infernal Regions. If you know your party’s extension, you are still required to hear to our complete list of 443,566 extension numbers before making your selection, as our menu options have changed.  _

_ Due to a high volume of calls, all our demons are busy addressing other complaints. Your call will be addressed when ambient temperatures in Hell reach 0 degrees Celsius. _

There was an odd droning noise over the messages from the call center. Crowley loped to the source of it and found a barred door and a sign that read CAUTION, THE BOTTOMLESS PIT IS BEING VACUUMED. PLEASE USE ALTERNATIVE ABYSSES.

Crowley felt foreboding slip down his spine like a cold drizzle.

When he entered Beelzebub’s office, the Prince of Hell was screaming into a cracked receiver. Crowley dropped into a spinny chair and began loudly sucking on a lolly the color of lipstick that was trying too hard.

Beelzebub hung up.

“ _ Finally, _ would it have killed you to be a little earlier?” A cloud of gnats orbited their head like planets in a repulsive solar system.

“Nope. Might have done for a few pedestrians in my way though, and they looked like the virtuous sort. Can’t have them taking the express route upstairs before they’ve had a proper chance to be corrupted. That’s why. ‘M late.”

Beelzebub scowled. “What flavor is that, anyway, is that viscera?”

“Er, yeah.” Crowley pocketed the lolly wrapper that said STRAWBERRY in a curlicue font.

“I need to talk to you, Crowley, and lucky for both of us it’s not about your request for time off to do fuck-all in Monaco. It’s important.”

“Is that what you were just on the phone about?”

“No,” Beelzebub stiffened. “That was an administrative issue. Some idiot from Guest Relations mandated that all new contracts have to be signed in the blood of the innocent.” Beelzebub gestured around them. “ _ Where the Heaven are we supposed to get THAT? _ ”

“Ah, shame, would have really fit the aesthetic,” Crowley said meekly. 

“Anyway, Crowley, you should know that the end of the world is happening in a month, and  _ certain members of senior management which do not include myself  _ feel that it would be very symbolically meaningful if the creator of Original Sin was also the one to kick off the whole thing.”

Crowley gave a stare that was notably blank even for someone whose eyes were perpetually occluded by several thousand pounds of designer opacity.

“Satan wants me to deliver his baby?”

“No, idiot, the kid’s already up on earth, didn’t you read paragraph four hundred of the staff newsletter eleven years ago?”

“Er…”

“Forget it. Next week Hastur and Ligur are going to give you a hellhound pup, and you are to bring it to the Antichrist as a birthday present. Try to put some effort into the wrapping. And the card.”

Crowley wanted to retort that he wasn’t at all confident there was a quality selection of greeting cards in the  _ Congratulations On Bringing About The End Times _ section of your average stationery store, but he thought better of it.

“Right. Birthday card. Antichrist. Hell puppy. End of the world. Anything else?”

Beelzebub smiled, revealing far too many teeth and far too little flossing. 

“We’ve received word that the birdbrains upstairs might try to interfere. If you catch any angels hovering around, tell them we’re preparing a  _ very  _ special place in Hell for them when it’s all over.”

“Oh you don’t have to worry about me. I won’t hesitate to tell angels.”

Crowley was true to his word. He dialed Aziraphale before he was off the escalator.

“My dear,” Aziraphale said when he picked up, “you ought to know that the world’s started ending.”

“Angel,” Crowley interrupted, “How the fuck do you gift-wrap a puppy?”

Footnotes

7 Aziraphale had been to Crowley’s apartment only a handful of times, and each time it gave him the distinct impression of sleaze. He was not sure whether it was caused by some unseen demonic patina that coated Crowley’s home or the fact that he himself had a bit too much interest in a variety of Crowley’s intimate spaces.  [return to text ]

8 Unhappy Hours were Hell-sponsored events intended to quell grumblings among the horde about things like inadequate holidays, limited opportunity for professional advancement, and the frequent razings of office furniture by swarms of fireproof locusts. The drinks provided ranged from pleasantly poisonous to unaccountably sludgy, but the gatherings were regarded as true highlights of the infernal social calendar.

Most of them began with declared intentions of hellish revelry and rampage and ended with karaoke renditions of advertising jingles and mass emails of ceiling cat memes to the angels.

Crowley typically downed half a cauldron of viscous mystery punch, performed his classic party trick of turning into a giant snake and crushing the desk of an unlucky intern, and spent the rest of the night very much not pickling in gloomy romantic longing.  [return to text ]

9 This wasn’t strictly true. Crowley nursed a dark and embarrassing secret: he had a terrific sweet tooth. The last thing he’d eaten was a six-tiered wedding cake. He despised couples who had the audacity to marry in public parks where he was trying to brood or sulk. Typically he just miracled up a quick downpour, or a sudden onset of angry pigeons, but on a recent Saturday the sounds of overpriced merriment had dreadfully interrupted his crossword, and he’d stolen away the cake and eaten all six tiers in one sinful serpentine swallow. He had never confessed this fondness for sweets to Aziraphale, who was under the impression that Crowley subsisted on spite and cocktail garnishes.  [return to text ]

10 In September of 1945, Crowley walked into the bookshop to find Aziraphale sobbing wretchedly into a plate of sponge cake and lemon curd while Judy Garland sang “Get Happy” from the old phonograph.

“Did you see—New Mexico—oh Crowley I don’t think I can bear it if the world just explodes—if only—but I’m an angel, it can’t be—”

“No! No—angel, it’s not that, yet—there’s all this shit my people have got to do, hellhound’s not even out of obedience school—and the Bottomless Pit hasn’t been vacuumed in a millennium, no way they’re starting the end of the world. Promise.”

After much fretting and cajoling, and following the consumption of great quantities of saline-soaked sponge cake and port wine, they came to an agreement. When Armageddon finally arrived, they would be ready. To think of how to stop Armageddon.  [return to text ]


	3. The Air Plant and the Cactus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale and Crowley have a brainstorming session and get carried away; Gabriel and Beelzebub contemplate the end of the world.

“We are having _one_ drink.”

Aziraphale gave Crowley a look over the neck of a bottle. It was a grave look. The gravity of that look could have held several moons in orbit.

“Right, of course,” Crowley agreed. “One drink. World’s ending, serious stuff. We shouldn’t be sozzled for that, even if this could be the last Priorat you ever have.”

There was a flicker on Aziraphale’s face between his eyebrows and his pouring hand wavered. His glass filled almost to the rim.

“One drink.”

Crowley smirked. 

It was just after sunset had turned all the dust motes in the bookshop into pinpricks of floating gold. The evening was fine and clear in the wake of a lazy afternoon drizzle now puddling greasily in the streets of Soho. Music lilted with some difficulty through the poorly-ventilated air of A.Z. Fell and Co., though whether its melody was really coming from the old gramophone or was simply the side effect of nearby angelic nerves, it was hard to say.[11]

Aziraphale set down the bottle and wiped his hands on his trousers with a solicitous air, as though he was trying to reassure his front pockets that everything would turn out right.

“Well, there’s no putting it off any longer, Crowley. I’m afraid the trumpet has, er, metaphorically been blown. We need to be serious about this.”

“I’m serious! Just because we faffed around for eighty-odd years—”

“We weren’t _faffing around,_ we were _monitoring the developing situation—_ ”

“Fine, I was faffing around and you were monitoring the developing situation—”

“The important thing is we’re taking care of it now.” Aziraphale stoppered the wine with finality. “Let’s agree to see things through this time.”

Crowley lifted his eyes from the point of his shoe. 

“What, you want to swear on a bottle of Priorat?”

Aziraphale considered as Crowley sipped.

“I don’t see why not,” Aziraphale said finally. “Here, take it.”

A plump hand and a bony one reached simultaneously to throttle the wine. The edge of Crowley’s palm impressed ever so lightly upon Aziraphale’s knuckle.

Aziraphale looked at Crowley, his eyes glimmering, expectant.

“Right, er, by the forces of Heaven and Hell and the potency of this vintage, we the parties to this agreement do, er, solemnly agree to save the world,” Crowley extemporized.

Both angel and demon were a little pink about the ears. Aziraphale had a tendency to redden whenever his hand touched Crowley’s. Crowley had a tendency to blush whenever Azirapahle’s fingers held an oblong object.

Aziraphale gave a brittle laugh, and their hands retracted.

“You’re alright, aren’t you? Been fine since you called?” Crowley asked, in his best impression of being casual.

“Me? Of course, whyever not?” Aziraphale bustled around to his desk for paper and pens.

In fact, he had not been handling the news of the impending apocalypse all that well. 

Early that morning, Aziraphale had gone to his third-favorite bakery and bought a dozen sugared palmiers, with the intention of consuming them in St. James’ Park to palliate his nerves. Once arrived at his customary pastry-eating bench, however, he found he had lost all inclination to snack, and was feeling queasy about the middle. (Doom, like coffee and cigarettes, is a powerful appetite suppressant.) 

In a fit of slightly nauseated despair, he crushed all twelve palmiers and scattered them for the ducks. It was only after he had attracted a considerable audience of waterfowl that he remembered reading about the injurious properties of bread upon the avian digestive system, and was seized with a wave of guilt. He was just about to make all the palmiers evaporate when he remembered that in a month’s time all the birds would be dead, consumed in holy fire or possibly bludgeoned by precipitating fish.

“Oh, do go on then, for old times’ sake,” he whimpered to the nibbling flock.

Crowley, on the other hand, after a bracing excoriation of his rhododendrons, had attempted to sleep through the entire day before meeting Aziraphale. When drowsiness refused to attend him he began reading the tax code in the hope that it would bore him into oblivion, but he became far too invested in the loopholes. Finally, deciding that extreme times called for extreme measures, he changed himself into a snake and curled up in his own refrigerator on top of a bowl of raspberry fool. Having thus inactivated what passed for a metabolism in his long-suffering body, he slumbered peacefully in a state akin to raspberry-scented hibernation. 

In the bookshop, the evening light was beginning to dim.

“Right, so what do we know about the apocalypse?” Crowley asked, after uncapping a pen with his teeth.

Aziraphale’s fingers twitched at the indignity visited upon his writing utensil. 

“Well, we know there’s an eleven-year-old boy who is getting a dog as a birthday present. We know that gift will incite the end of the world. And we know it’s all happening terribly fast. Like a brat out of hell.”

“That is _not_ the expression. _Bat,_ Azirapale, it’s _bat._ ”

Aziraphale regarded Crowley, who was still holding the pen cap in his mouth, with amicable iciness.

“Oh it isn’t? I suppose it just seemed appropriate.”

“Ah, don’t get all righteous about this,” Crowley scowled. He poured himself over the sofa and reached lazily for the bottle.”I’m having another drink.”

“Crowley, we agreed—”

“You’ve had a full glass already, I’m just catching up with you.”

Aziraphale opened his mouth, then closed it again with an abashed clack of teeth.

“Well I do suppose we wouldn’t want sobriety to be an impediment to the, er, thinking process,” he said slowly. “The brainstorming part, anyway.”

“Beelzebub calls it the idea generation phase.’” Crowley snorted as he glugged wine into his glass.

“Do they really?” Aziraphale brightened, reaching for the bottle himself. “Gabriel refers to it as the ‘generative ideation phase.’ You know, for someone who claims to love efficiency so much, it takes him a damned long time to get to the point of things.” 

Aziraphale’s face was flushed, glowing with candor. Crowley tilted his head as if in surprise, but a smile twisted its way up the corner of his mouth. 

“Well, anyway,” Aziraphale said, recollecting himself. “Let’s try to get a list of possibilities.”

“Shame we didn’t start this a bit earlier,” Crowley mused. “Whole lot of plans right out.”

“Like what?” 

“Well, we can’t do anything that involves hiding secret prophecies in a 500-year old tree now, can we?”

“Oh no, I suppose not. Really nothing with ancient prophecies. It’s such a shame we didn’t know we were living in ancient times while they were happening.”

“We should have compared notes a bit more. I bet we could have found out when the Antichrist was going to be born. Maybe who his dear old mummy was.”

Aziraphale took a sip and frowned. “What good would that do?”

“Well if we _knew_ we could have found his mum, told her ‘look, don’t shag anyone who seems too good to be true, alright? Just, take a break from the whole scene for a bit, go discover yourself.’ And it might have saved the world _and_ let her, you know, fuck up her life on her own terms.”

“I don’t think that would have worked,” Aziraphale said thoughtfully. “I don’t think people make very logical decisions when it comes to, well, matters of the heart.”

“‘Matters of the heart,’ c’mon, you know perfectly well it’s more like matters of the—”

“I believe the point stands,” Aziraphale interrupted. “Anyway, the element of physical attraction probably only clouds the judgment further. I can well imagine some poor creature fancying themselves in love with a beautiful man even if he was, well, a literal fiend from Hell.”

Crowley, a literal fiend from Hell, attempted to make some rebuttal to this. What emerged from his throat sounded less like speech and more like a buzzsaw plunging into a vat of jelly.

“Well, nothing to be done about it, we can’t change the past.” Aziraphale straightened his cuffs and avoided Crowley’s gaze.

“Probably not,” Crowley agreed at last. Then he wrote ‘TIME TRAVEL’ in large, loopy script on his sheet of paper. “Though we might want to have a backup.”[12]

“I don’t suppose the Antichrist is, ah, vulnerable to physical harm of any sort?” Aziraphale asked, looking determinedly at his wineglass.

Something in Crowley’s face twitched. “You mean…”

“Oh for Heaven’s sake, you must have thought of it too, you’re a demon,” Aziraphale said in a rush.

“Nah, he’s not. Got it out of Hastur yesterday afternoon. Apparently the kid stepped on an old tin of condensed milk when he was five. Almost died of tetanus, so they made him invulnerable after that. Was this whole top-level fuss.”

“Well, that’s good to know. Of course, I’d like to think if he _had_ been vulnerable to mortal wounds that we would have found some other way regardless.”

“Sure you would have,” Crowley said in a near-grunt. “You’re too bloody soft, you’d do the right thing. Eventually.”

Aziraphale beamed. “You really think so?”

“Aziraphale,” Crowley said over the top of his sunglasses, and his eyes betrayed a glaze of wine, “you’re a fuckin’ angel.”

* * *

That evening in Heaven, Gabriel was admiring the air plant he had bought in a London florist’s as a souvenir by which to remember the Earth.

“You’re looking nice and green,” Gabriel remarked to his ascended _Tillandsia._ ‘Nice’ and ‘green’ formed the totality of his concept of botanical health. “Let’s look over our workshop agenda, what do you say?”[13]

He opened a crisp binder marked _Dancing on the Head of a Pain: Managing Ergonomic Difficulties in the Non-Corporeal Workplace._ The _Tillandsia_ made no reply, but respired companionably.

“Wonder if you miss the Earth. Sure you do. Perfectly natural. Never seen a soul that didn’t miss the big blue backyard. But we deal with that all the time, that’s what Orientation Week is for. Get you situated in the best place Creation has to offer. You’ll love it here. They all do.”

Gabriel had been rehearsing versions of this reassurance to his collection of silk ties, his wall mounted copy of the Ten Commandments, and his paperback copy of _The Ten Commandments of Effective Leadership._ He was almost beginning to be reassured himself.

* * *

“And then the Antichrist will become the first deep space explorer, and leave Earth bloody well alone!” Aziraphale announced. He was holding the empty Priorat bottle aloft in the manner of a classical statue lifting a victorious spear.

“Not bad,” Crowley said, before turning his head and burping slightly. “Still don’t like that plan as much as the one with the windmills.”

“Well if you don’t approve of my ideas, start coming up with your own instead of just listing out the plots of all the _Mission: Improbable_ films—”

“I said I liked the windmills! Hey, what do you think of—oh good, you’ve opened another, it’s only eleven o’clock...”

* * *

Far below the bookshop, amid the scorching cubicles of Hell, Beelzebub was talking to a cactus.

“Whole damn thing started with Heaven so it’zz only fair we end with Hell. Won’t the blessed ones all be surprizzed their millennia of piousness getz them eternal damnation after all?” 

The _Astrophytum_ did not quite know what to make of this pyrrhic musing, but it did now that being regifted to the Prince of Hell was the best thing that had ever happened to it. In its current life on Beelzebub’s desk, it endured verbal ruminations over lurid revenge fantasies, a sickening atmosphere of hopelessness and asbestos particles, and now and again a shower of sparks from the throes of a moribund printer.[14]

But in its previous life, the _Astrophytum_ had endured Crowley.

“You’re a dezert plant, you must know something of pain,” Beelzebub murmured. “Of deprivation. Look at you, you’re a pile of needlezz. Haven’t you ever wanted the chance to sink them into someone? Wouldn’t that make you happy?”

The cactus sat in spiny silence.

Beelzebub sighed. “Yeah, I hope it’zz all worth it too.”

* * *

“Angel. D’you know what would be funny?”

Crowley was lying on his back on the carpet, a notepad of increasingly scribbly ideas propped on his chest. Aziraphale was lying beside him about a foot away, clutching a packet of custard creams.

Two empty wine bottles glinted disapprovingly from the coffee table.

“What would be funny, dear? Would you like a custard cream, by the way? Only one left.”

“Nah, you know I don’t go in for that sweet stuff.” (He had eaten four while Aziraphale was distracted.)

“Well what was it, then?” 

“I was thinking. ‘Bout the dog. Hellhound puppy.” There was a swish of wine and a swallow.

“Hm?” A crunching of the final custard cream.

“What if we just—just kept him? Made him a family pet of sorts, and didn’t give him to the Antichrist. Could move out of London, somewhere secluded where everyone’s got a great big dog anyway.”

Aziraphale didn’t answer. Crowley turned, wriggling on the carpet so he could see Aziraphale’s face. “Is that stupid? You’re right, angel, it’s stupid.”

“Actually, I’ve always rather wanted a dog,” Aziraphale said. His eyes were fixed on the intricate patterns of the bookshop ceiling.[15] “I don’t think it would be right to move to the country without having a dog, really. ‘S all the suitable thing.”

“‘M not saying you’d hafta look after it with me—pretty stupid for an angel to be looking after a creature of Hell,” Crowley struggled clumsily with his sentence as though shouldering his way through a long-neglected hedge.

Aziraphale hoisted himself on his elbows. His face was all at once very close to Crowley’s. 

“My dear, if you think I haven’t learned a thing or two about looking after a creature of Hell in our rather long acquaintance—well, I’m sure I wouldn’t want you to do it all on your own.”

Aziraphale’s smile dragged a little at the edge, and the consonants he spoke were softened, indistinct. 

“We could be dogfathers.” 

Crowley’s eyes were turned to gold, and he leaned forward with a dripping slowness.

“Angel, we could be—”

“I think we’d better sober up.” Aziraphale sat upright. He gave his waistcoat a tug, and gave Crowley a look that might have been a warning and might have been an apology.

“Right, yeah,” Crowley said to the pile of the carpet.

There was an ugly pause filled with the sounds of slurping in reverse, and Aziraphale and Crowley blinked at one another with cleared eyes.

“Fuck, all our ideas are rubbish,” Crowley groaned.

“I don’t think the windmills are going to work after all.”

A heavy, horribly sober pall fell over the bookshop.

“Sod this,” Crowley said. “I’m going to sleep, we’ll come up with a real plan in the morning.”

Aziraphale folded the empty box of custard creams with a mournful air.

“I’ll get you a blanket, dear, you can sleep here if you’d like.”

Crowley was already depositing himself onto the sofa, where he pooled bonelessly among the aging cushions.

Aziraphale fetched his promised blanket and, reflecting on the chill of the night, a hot water bottle, which he filled with a flick of his fingers.

“I’m sure we’ll think of something over breakfast,” he said gently, leaning over the sofa.

“Angel, stop making a fuss,” Crowley protested, even as he drew the blanket up to his ears and clung to the hot water bottle.

A minute passed while Aziraphale looked at Crowley’s slackening face and listened to the onset of muffled snoring. There was a an old dictionary from a secondhand shop that needed repairing sitting on Aziraphale’s desk, and eventually he wrenched his attention from the sleeping demon on his couch and attended to that ailing book.

It was a dusty red, with yellow pages and a thready spine. Aziraphale had bought it on a whim when he noticed that someone had inked the names of books beside many of the words, presumably attributing their personal discoveries. He thumbed a page at random.

_Desire (noun). A longing, a craving for something not attained._

“Hmph.” Aziraphale leaned back and, as if from habit, cast a glance at Crowley lying prone and pliant across the sofa. He hurriedly turned back to his dictionary.

_See also, a strong sexual appetite._

“Really now, there’s no call for that,” Aziraphale said. “I don’t think I’ll repair you at all.”

He shoved the dictionary to the side and selected a slim edition of William Blake, which he began to read in a state of dudgeon.  
  


* * *

It was 4am when a loud shout roused Aziraphale from a perusal of Northrop Frye.

“I’ve got it, angel! I know how to stop Armageddon!”

Crowley was gesturing wildly with the hot water bottle and attempting to clamber out of the blanket that had wound itself around his legs after the Gordian fashion.

“You—what? While you were sleeping?”

“I was thinking, right, as I was falling asleep, about the best way to stop it. And I asked myself ‘OK, what’s the most powerful force in the Universe?’” He looked at Aziraphale as though waiting for an answer.

“Er, the divinity of the Almighty? Or do you mean one of those new ones the humans discovered, the, ah, glue between the atoms, is it? Or was that electricity…” 

Aziraphale, though he had a keen mind for the natural sciences, felt that it was professionally improper to mix physics and metaphysics, and consequently his understanding of such things as matter and energy was a little fuzzy.

“No, none of that—it’s _managerial interference._ If we can get the higher-ups in Heaven and Hell to _want_ to stop the apocalypse, they’ll derail the whole thing!”

Aziraphale blinked.

“That’s all very well, but how on earth do you plan to get Gabriel and Beelzebub to suddenly want to avert Armageddon?”

Crowley flashed a brilliant, fanged smile.

“We’ve got to get them to get together. Like, in a romantic sense.”

“ _What?_ ”

There was a ceramic clank as Aziraphale set his mug of tea down on the desk with extraordinary vehemence.

“Look, I know it sounds ridiculous—”

“It sounds like something out of one of those stupid films you watch and pretend you’ve never seen.”

“—but hear me out, Aziraphale, I mean, we’re completely screwed and out of reasonable options, we’ve got two bosses with more in common than I think they realize, and we need to do something so the earth doesn’t get deep fried and served up to the most ruthless celestial army.”

Aziraphale took a shuddering breath. There were many questions he wanted to ask, but the first one that came out was,

“And what made you think of _entanglements_ between and angel and a demon at 4am, pray tell?”

“Nothing weird,” Crowley said defensively. “Just, I dunno, fine, maybe I have seen a few films where some grouchy lawyer goes to a hopeless small town and falls in love with the barkeep or what-have-you. It’s the formula, you know, it’s nothing like—” One hand flailed cryptically.

“We are not getting out of this by pretending we’re in the pictures,” Aziraphale sniffed. “I think it would be best if you went back to bed, and I’ll continue to think of actual ideas until breakfast.”

“Fine,” Crowley sighed. “I’d rather be sleeping than having this argument anyway.”

They rearranged themselves for sleep and study in a kind of mutual huff, and pointedly did not look at one another. It was only after a quarter of an hour elapsed that Aziraphale tip-toed his way to the sofa and tucked the blanket carefully over a spindly, demonic shoulder.

Footnotes

11 Angels, when agitated, are capable of producing music unawares. The so-called music of the spheres is really a leftover thrum from the hectic days of last-minute pre-Creation jitters, rather like the ethereal equivalent of the cosmic microwave background. The knowledge of this ability was lost among demons after the Fall, so when Crowley heard swoony waltzes playing in the background of certain conversations with Aziraphale late in the evening, he dismissed it as a stupid flight of his own pathetic fancy.  [return to text ]

12 It wasn’t the first time Crowley had suggested time travel as a solution to a looming deadline. When Crowley was cut off from the infernal expense account in 1980 for trying to buy a private island, he had briefly entertained the idea of hopping back a decade to build a bit more goodwill with his supervisors.

“Why in the world did you try to buy a private island?” Aziraphale asked him later. “What sort of ridiculous scheme were you planning?”

“There was no scheme! I swear, it was a totally schemeless island,” Crowley protested.

“Well then whatever did you want it for?”

“Just thought it might be nice to live someplace warm by the sea. Five hundred years of English winters have been a bit rough on the scales.”

“You’re utterly absurd,” Aziraphale said, and spent the next two months looking wistfully at holiday packages in the Azores.  [return to text ]

13The Tillandsia was feeling somewhat nervous. Generally speaking, it is considered very poor form to be alive in Heaven. Of course the angels live, after a fashion, but to most angels being alive is merely a funny consequence of being both extant and (infrequently) incarnate. In any case, they are outnumbered by the dead about 53,500 to 1.  [return to text ]

14The printer, a stout Xerox aged beyond its years by the stress of the job, was by this point less office equipment and more of a wheezing box that surprised Beelzebub now and again by printing things in between death rattles.  [return to text ]

15That is to say, on the decades-old cobwebs.  [return to text ]


	4. Pillow Mints

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for sticking with this story through its delays! I hope you enjoy this new chapter!

It was the morning after a demon’s night out and Beelzebub had consumed a few too many screwdrivers. After the third drink or so, the metal bits really began to give them indigestion.[16]

There were over a dozen emails greeting the Prince of Hell on their wheezing eTower when they plopped down in the corner office after chasing a paracetamol with eight ounces of lighter fluid. They scowled, steeled their resolve, and scrolled.

_Hundreds of Demons Report Glossier Wings in Three Weeks!_

_Prohibited Miracle Report #8038516982409_

_A Greeting Card for You_

_You Have 1,400,000,000 Souls Waiting_

_Prohibited Miracle Report #8038516982410_

Beelzebub heaved a long, asbestos-filled sigh. They deleted the advert for glossier wings (the Prince of Hell was doing perfectly well on that score, thank you), archived the soul notification, and read absently through the prohibited miracle reports before deleting them and making a note to cut holiday hours for the whole compliance department. 

They were poised to open the purported greeting card when something from beneath the desk produced a series of thumps, followed closely by a snuffle.

“How did you get out, then, aren’t you supposed to be in the kennel?” Beelzebub asked.

The hellhound puppy was small and fuzzy and possessed of incalculable teeth. It looked like the exact average of a chihuahua and a horrific entity whose mere existence causes reality to dissolve in agonized shrieks. Beelzebub gave it a gentle scratch behind the ears.

It whined, wagged its poison-tipped tail, and nestled further into Beelzebub’s hand.

“Don’t get attached,” they warned. “I’m not your Antichrist.”

There was a rap on the door, which caused the hellpuppy to begin growling in the manner of especially feisty tectonic plates.

“Who is it?” Beelzebub shouted. 

“Erm, I’ve got an eleven o’clock, you alright?” Crowley’s lack of enthusiasm was audible through the office door. 

“Yeah, come in, hellhound puppy just wandered out again. Probably looking for some ankles to chew.”

Crowley approached desk, Beelzebub, and hellhound with all the eagerness of a bad flosser mounting the dentist’s chair. From behind his sunglasses, his yellow eyes met the puppy’s red ones, which narrowed as it began to bark.

“Your Lowness, mind if I, er, stand for this one? Maybe we should take a walking meeting. Just read an article about those, supposed to be helpful for the er, creativity. And the legs.”

Crowley was not good with pets, and pets were not especially good with Crowley. They seemed to sense the scales under his skin; in his presence all manner of theoretically domesticated creatures were prone to barking, hissing, biting, scratching, running away, and vomiting undue quantities of hairball. 

Aziraphale had, over the years, fed roving groups of alley cats, looked after lost dogs, and kept the odd parrot. They all hated Crowley, as if they found him some threat to Aziraphale (which, he reflected morosely, he probably was). The only pets Crowley had ever kept himself were a pair of blue tangs, and he had only bought them to further the torture of a tankful of kelp.

“He’s almost ready,” Beelzebub crooned at the hellhound. “Aren’t you, you little mangy monster?”

To Beelzebub’s satisfaction and Crowley’s horror, the hellhound licked the Prince of Hell’s pustulent wrist.

“Do I get a carrier for him?” Crowley asked, gripping a stapler with barely-controlled panic.

“We’ve got all his stuff ready,” Beelzebub said, and gestured to the corner of the office.

There was a large carrier[17] surrounded by dingy miscellany, among which could be found a rhinestone collar, a metal dog dish with demonic runes soldered into the sides, a flimsy-looking leash, and a framed portrait of three wolves howling at the moon that had BE THE DOOM YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD written on it in fabric pen.

Crowley arched a ginger eyebrow above his sunglasses. “Did you really make a motivational poster for a dog?”

“Ligur’s idea,” Beelzebub said quickly. “We cut it out of a t-shirt. Anyway, the puppy stays here until he’s finished disobedience school. Let’s talk about getting you involved with the reception.”

“Reception?”

“The Post-Earth Survivor’s Soiree. If the angels win, it’s the Toast to the Triumph of Heaven. If we win, it’s the Hellish Hangover-Maker. The caterers are preparing two different sets of ice sculptures.”

“Right. OK. Oh, er, speaking hypothetically, is this post-world-ending reception a ‘bring a plus one’ sort of occasion?”

Beelzebub’s face clouded with suspicion. Their eyes became insectoid, glittering..

“Who in the Heaven are you taking to the Hellish Hangover-Maker, Crowley?”

“Well, nobody in Heaven, _obviously,_ ” Crowley quipped with a nervous chuckle. “Just, ah, wondered if you were thinking of bringing anyone?”

Beelzebub looked at the cactus on their desk and appeared to be calculating the likelihood of needle-to-snake-eye contact at various lobbed trajectories. “I don’t have time for this shit, Crowley, just go check in with Hastur about the vendor approvals, will you?”

Crowley bolted from the hellhound’s vicinity like a rattler from a Texas barbecue.

* * *

A thin curtain of sleet gave an eerie gloss to the windows of the old cafe. Aziraphale and Crowley were huddled inside eating parsnip soup and contemplating the sensual properties of spoons going in and out of mouths, respectively. It was the middle of the day, but the grey tumult of the weather outside gave the cafe a strange out-of-time look: it could have been 7am, or noon, or the dead of night. Perhaps this was what all the days would look like, after the end: an endless slurry of November.

“Did you think of anything else, then?” Crowley asked. “Any more brilliant ideas to save the world that don’t involve setting up our managers?” 

Aziraphale took a disapproving sip of blended parsnip. Behind him the cakes and pastries glowed greenly in the display case.[18]

“No, as a matter of fact, I haven’t thought of anything,” he confessed. 

“Thought you might say that,” Crowley said, pulling off his mittens. “Lucky for everyone on this planet, I’ve been getting to work.” He opened a stylish briefcase and extracted a binder covered in black paper.

“This binder,” Crowley began, in as reverent a whisper as demonic lips allow, “contains everything we need to make Gabriel and Beelzebub think they’re in love with each other.”

Aziraphale blanched. “Crowley! You’ve got _aphrodisiacs_ in there?” 

“What? No, angel—it’s _spreadsheets._ ”

Aziraphale set down his spoon.

“Please tell me you’re joking.”

"I got this _laminated._ Look, they’ve got headings, there’s ‘Favorite Meals,’ ‘Theoretical Dealbreakers,’ and ‘Notes on Personal Hygiene/Lack Thereof.’ We can do this, Aziraphale, we know all about them!”

“They’re fundamentally incompatible! Look, I can answer for these all right now. Gabriel doesn’t have a favorite meal because he doesn’t eat, his personal hygiene involves taking three showers in medical-grade antiseptic wash every time he comes back from earth, and his _theoretical dealbreakers_ almost certainly include being a creature of Hell!”

“Yeah OK but let’s consider all that ‘opposite of love isn’t hate’ crap,” Crowley drawled, swiping a finger around the divot on the lip of his espresso cup.

“Crowley, Gabriel is the last person in all the heavens I can imagine showing an ounce of sympathy for a demon, let alone having anything to talk about socially with one!” Aziraphale leaned forward across the table. “He reminisces about rending demons apart in the War in Heaven. He invented the Righteous Rewards employee perk system. He draws little horns and tails on pieces of paper before putting them in the shredder just for the satisfaction of watching doodled evil turn into confettied remains.”

“That sounds to me,” Crowley said, leaning closer in turn, “like an obsession.”

“But where would they even _meet?_ ” Aziraphale pressed.

“Well, there’s Earth for one. Limbo for another. They’ve got this little demarcated zone in Limbo where no one’s allowed to corrupt or smite each other, as you probably know. S’used for meetings on stuff like the nature of sin and the commercialization of Christmas. I heard they’ve got a juice bar put in.”

Aziraphale scowled unconvinced. “Does Beelzebub even like men? Or, well, angels that delight in personifying male authority figures?”

Crowley drained the last of his espresso and set the cup in its miniscule saucer. “Clearly you weren’t there for the infamous round of Fuck, Marry, Kill held at the 1985 end-of-year hellraiser.”

“Isn’t that a kind of salamander?”

“What? Angel, fuck, marry, kill is—do I really have to explain this?”

“No, a _hellraiser_ is a kind of salamander, I swear I’ve seen it on nature programs, there was this one about _Reptiles and Amphibians of North America—_ ”

“That’s a hell _bender,_ Aziraphale.” Crowley’s face became suddenly rigid. “Why were you watching nature programs about reptiles, hm? Not enough snakes in your life?”

Aziraphale did not dignify that with a response, but he did demean it with a kick under the table.

“Anyway, well, I guess Gabriel could be a problem.” Crowley frowned. “I mean, gender-wise I’m not sure if Beelzebub’s more of an all-of-the-above or none-of-the-above or something in between, but they’ve been liable to incinerate anyone who refers to them as ‘Princess of Hell’ since the late 18th century.”

“Gabriel likes people who are shorter than him,” Aziraphale said rapidly.

Crowley shot him a look, and he buried his face in his hands.

“Oh bloody heaven Aziraphale don’t tell me—”

“Hm? Oh _no,_ no no no, _never,_ goodness me—we were on an assignment in about 600 BC, inspiring a prophet. It’s _terribly_ exhausting giving someone photorealistic visions—we didn’t call them that at the time, but there were _quality standards_ for that sort of thing, you know—and we were in a rather frazzled frame of mind at the end of several days in the desert. Anyway, we had a rather candid conversation. Gabriel....enjoys it when people look _up_ at him.” Aziraphale shifted uncomfortably. “You know...worshipfully.”

Crowley snorted. “OK, the adoration bit might be tricky, but at least the heights match up.” His face slackened. “Wait, is that, like an angel thing? You lot don’t like it when someone’s taller…?”

Aziraphale gave a look that threatened to cool his own soup into inedible tepidity. “I’m quite sure that among angels there’s the usual individual variety in preferences.”

Crowley seemed to have at once a strong urge to rearrange his limbs and nowhere to move his legs that did not risk a brush with angelic knees.

“Look, Crowley, this is all very well, but we’re just skating over the fundamental objection.”

“Wassthat?”

“Whoever heard of an angel and a demon _on a date?_ ”

“Your check, gentlemen.” The waiter reappeared and deposited a blue and white tin with a paper.

“I’ll get that one, it’s my turn to buy lunch,” Crowley offered.

“No, you mustn’t, you brought the wine to the picnic last Sunday and I _know_ how much that Sémillon cost you.” A plump hand took hold of the tin with the check.

Crowley raised his hands in a gesture of bemused, and quite temporary, surrender.

“Look, angel, I don’t want to go prodding into any sensitive areas, so to speak—”

“—charming selection of phrase, dear—”

“—but I do think there’s something to the idea of the attraction of the forbidden.”

Aziraphale’s frown would have withered Crowley’s plants more surely than diatribes and crossword-whackings ever could.

“That may well be true for humans in feuding families and war zones and mutual non-compete contracts and so forth, but I highly doubt that such a thing could overcome the objections of a Lord of Hell and an Archangel.”

Crowley smiled: it was a sinister, curling thing.

“You really don’t see why an angel might get tired of all that uprightness and decide to—well, _slouch_ a little?” He stretched on an alarming diagonal. “Maybe it’s just the corrupted mind of an inveterate evil-doer like me, but I’d imagine quite a few angels wouldn’t say no to a taste of something a bit wicked, if they could only try it discreetly.” 

“Do stop leering like that dear, you look like one of those women in the chocolate adverts.”

“Am I wrong, Aziraphale?”

“Well, even if that _was_ true, do you actually think demons are all secretly curious about” —Aziraphale made a helpless fluttering gesture with his teaspoon—” _courting_ angels?”

Crowley sputtered a little. “I mean, hardly the sort I’d pick out for a group of born seducers, but at least your lot are clean, and your skin does this sort of luminous thing, it’s—” Crowley trailed off into a noise that sounded like an exceptionally secure password.

Aziraphale arranged his hands around his bowl of soup in what he hoped was an inconspicuous attempt to wipe off the sudden sheen of moisture that had bloomed across his palms.

The waiter came back with Aziraphale’s change and several pillow mints that sat helpfully on the tin.[19]

“You know it’s not actually forbidden. Not in the Employee Code of Conduct, anyway” Crowley blurted.

“Excuse me?”

“Dating an angel isn’t actually against Hell’s rules, in the sense that no one has ever written down ‘demons can’t shag angels or they’ll be fired.’”

“Oh Crowley, be serious. Heaven hasn’t expressly outlawed using halos as—as flying discs to take out unsuspecting mortals, but I’m pretty sure that would incur at least some—disciplinary action, or something.”

“That how you lot are planning on winning against the infernal forces? Frisbee-ing us to death?”

Aziraphale’s face grew suddenly dark. “I haven’t been privy to military strategy. They’re quite serious, you know.”

Crowley’s hand twitched, as if he was going to reach forward for Aziraphale’s, but he only grabbed one of the pillow mints left on the tin.[20]

Suddenly _Ave Maria_ could be heard coming from somewhere below the table. Aziraphale jumped.

“Oh dear, speak of the angel—that’ll be Gabriel,” he said, pulling out an ungainly block of metal that Crowley was forced to conclude must be a mobile phone.

“Since when do you have one of those?” he asked, gaping at it like a fish recently separated from the ocean depths.

“Required pre-apocalypse purchase. I, er, made a few modifications to the standard issue—hello, yes, Gabriel, of course I’ve got a moment.” Aziraphale stood up and strode into the specious privacy offered by a plastic plant frond.

“Did those modifications to your phone include crossbreeding it with a microwave from the nineteen fifties?” Crowley jabbed.

“Yes, Gabriel, sorry, bit of _interference._ ”

“Aziraphale, hey, buddy, your computer OK?” Gabriel sounded as though he was in a room that echoed impressively, which could have been any room in Heaven.

“Erm, yes, nothing wrong with it that I’m aware.”

“Oh, OK, great, it’s just that you didn’t confirm any of the last three invites I sent through the staff list. We’re going to have a post-apocalypse strategy session, it’s gonna be great. Working title: Reimagining Company Culture in a World Without Rivals: An Angelcentric Approach to Organizational Synthesis.”

He paused, as if waiting for applause.

“Er, lovely,” Aziraphale muttered.

“It’s gonna be _fantastic,_ Aziraphale. Just think of what it’ll be like in a world with only angels! We’re all gonna see more of you at the upstairs office, and I’m betting you’ll find it a refreshing change.”

“Quite.”

“OK, well, turn on your computer, we need to get an accurate halo count for the workshop materials. See ya topside.”

He hung up. Aziraphale made his way back to the cafe table where Crowley was anxiously cradling the salt shaker.

“I still think this is a foolish plan,” Aziraphale said, “but I promise you, I will be _very_ dedicated to seeing it go through.”

Footnotes

16 Hell’s grasp on mixology was not exactly firm. Hastur was fond of grasshoppers as much for their entomological properties as for their crème de menthe. Dagon liked Manhattans best when the subway grime had a chance to congeal a little. And the recipe for an infernal Bloody Mary could make queasy the most stalwart of stomachs.  [return to text ]

17 It was actually a lobster trap, but neither the Prince of Hell nor the Serpent of Eden were aware of that.  [return to text ]

18 An odd ritual developed in which Aziraphale would order an eclair and eat the whole thing at pointed leisure, bite by torturous bite, while Crowley watched in utmost silence and attention. Said ritual was always concluded by Aziraphale licking a tiny spot of the cream filling off of his thumb, Crowley gripping his teacup very tightly, and each of them picking up the conversation as if they had never paused. The cafe stopped selling eclairs in 1936. Neither mentioned these episodes again, although around the 1950s Crowley asked Aziraphale if he’d ever tried cannoli and a similar observance arose. Most recently, the unacknowledged rite had been completed with the aid of pirouette wafers and unremitting denial.  [return to text ]

19 Aziraphale normally unwrapped one of these and popped it into his mouth without a second thought, but the recent pondering on the attraction of the forbidden was giving him pause. But surely no demon in his right mind would think eating a mint after dinner was some secret plea for an unsanctioned kiss?  [return to text ]

20He had noticed Aziraphale took one earlier. With all the recent conversation, Crowley wondered if perhaps it might be a sign he wasn’t entirely opposed to a bit of mouth-to-mouth affection between angels and demons in the face of the world’s ending.  [return to text ]


	5. Override Initiated

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads up, the rating has been raised on this one. There won't be any extensive onscreen sex, but the footnotes are likely to get a bit more feral. You've been warned.

Aziraphale was not accustomed to being closely surveilled. Hell had always kept a beady, bloodshot eye upon Crowley’s doing, but Heaven had been operating on something like the honor system for the last few thousand years (at least when no angels appeared poised become Lucifer 2.0). Recently, however, a good number of the lightning bolts that crashed around London contained smiling middle-managers coming to check on Aziraphale in the leadup to the apocalypse. It was making him jumpy, and he and Crowley no longer met at the bookshop, but carried out their meetings in places Heaven had little reason to suspect Aziraphale to visit. 

They met that day in the most unlikely place of all: the W Cafe inside the Greenwich Waterstones.[21] Aziraphale was perched primly on the edge of his seat like a songbird preparing for imminent flight; Crowley was sprawled on his chair like an exhibitionist starfish.

“So,” Aziraphale began, after some disdainful bites of a raspberry torte, “I suppose we’ve got to think of a first date.”

Aziraphale had spent so long picking out the torte at the counter that Crowley was halfway through drawing a flipbook on the inside of a copy of  _ Eat Pray Love. _ When you turned the pages quick enough, a face appeared, winked, and began to melt into a sludge of radioactive-looking flesh and free-floating eyeballs. When the angel spoke, Crowley stopped shading a disintegrating ear and tossed the book into his bag. 

“Right, yeah, first date. Reckon we can’t just send them off to the movies.”

Aziraphale grimaced. “Not unless Beelzebub has been harboring a secret desire for some sing-along Rodgers and Hammerstein.”

“Might be a hard sell, that one.”

“Well, what do you think would be best? It can’t be anything too contrived, of course.” Aziraphale wiped the sides of his takeaway cup with a napkin. “We can’t have them catching on.”

“Yeah alright, we won’t get them a couples getaway to Turks and Caicos.”

“Heavens no. It must be quite plausible.”

Crowley leaned back and smiled toothily at a spinning display of paperbacks.

“Shame we can’t just chuck them into an unsupervised garden, eh? Put in a couple of fruit trees for a light snack, arrange a few unanswerable moral dilemmas for conversation, provide a soft patch of grass for—”

“Crowley!”

“Sorry, angel.” He fiddled with the broken spine of  _ Eat Pray Love. _ “I guess the end of the world has me a little nostalgic for the beginning.”

“It’s not going to be like that, you know. We don’t have time for a whole—” Aziraphale drew a deep breath and appeared to fortify himself “— _ love affair  _ between them. Oh goodness, I still feel nauseated saying that.”

He picked at the cardboard drink sleeve, suddenly awkward. 

“Do angels do stuff other with other angels?” Crowley blurted out. “I mean, it can’t be all purity of thought all the time, 24/7, right?”[22]

For a brief but precipitous moment, Aziraphale seemed to be caught between outrage and a burning desire for office gossip.

Outrage surrendered in the face of an onslaught by superior forces.

“I don’t  _ know, _ ” Aziraphale half-whispered, leaning across the table. “I’ve overheard some things that indicate yes, and some things that indicate no, and I’d never straightened it out with anyone at the beginning, and now it’s been thousands of years and it’s far too late to ask whether angels ever—see each other.”

“I mean, you  _ could  _ ask.”

“No I can’t! Look, if the answer is yes, I’m going to look like the universe’s most ignorant numpty, and if the answer is no, they’ll think I’m some kind of—of sex-crazed pervert!”

Crowley tilted his chair back to an injudicious angle. “Say sex-crazed pervert again.”

Aziraphale glared. “I don’t really feel like talking about you right now, so I won’t.”

Crowley let his chair clunk forward and his mouth draw into a perfect little  _ O. _

“Look, whatever they think, facts are facts, Aziraphale, and one fact is you were screwing the literal hell out of a demon before most of your  _ esteemed coworkers _ had their first harp lesson.”

“We don’t all play the harp,” Aziraphale said sniffily. “That’s an offensive stereotype.”

Crowley put up his hands in a gesture so deferential it went straight back around to impertinent.

‘“Anyway, what about demons?” Aziraphale asked, looking into the increasingly shallow depths of his cocoa.

“What about demons?”

“Do they go about—do they, erm, go steady with one another?”

“Aziraphale, I swear to Satan you’ve got to stop saying ‘go steady,’ it’s been sixty years since that’s been only moderately embarrassing.”

“Well do they?”

“Demons definitely get up to stuff. At least according to what I had the misfortune to hear through the walls of our last team-building retreat.” Crowley shuddered. “I’m not—I haven’t—well, I can’t speak from any, er, personal experience, really.” The last part of his sentence disintegrated like the face in the flipbook.

Aziraphale and Crowley looked at one another, blue eyes to black lenses.

“The lift,” Aziraphale breathed.

“Wot?”

“They could meet in the lift—it goes through both offices, and I know an override code for the doors, and—oh I really think it might work!”

“You think the best place for a first date between two entities hellbent and heavenbent on destroying the whole world is a  _ lift? _ The music’s shit, angel.”

“Think of the shared adversity! And close quarters, and a sense of bewilderment.” Aziraphale looked like he might swoon in the midst of the Waterstones. “Crowley, you remember when we were on the Ark with all those creatures, we had no idea where we were going or when it might end?”

“Urgh, I try to forget that. A double dose of mosquitos, horses, scorpions, those creepy parasites that dig into the entrails of spiders, hawks,  _ mongooses, fucking mongooses— _ that was a nightmare, Aziraphale.”

“But don’t you think it made us a bit friendlier with one another? We really became companionable acquaintances after that, as opposed to, well, whatever we were before.”

“Enemies with a history of benefits?” Crowley offered. He considered.[23]

“I guess it’s worth a try. And if nothing else, at least we can say we tried to encourage Seven Minutes In Heaven in actual Heaven.”

“Is that—I would think there could be more than seven minutes, really, that’s not very adequate time to establish a rapport.”

“Angel, are you really telling me you don’t—?” Crowley scrubbed his face with one agitated hand. “Seven minutes in Heaven is a game humans play where they lock themselves in a closet and, er, usually they snog each other the whole time.”

Aziraphale blinked, once, twice, thrice. 

“How do you win, though?”

“What—angel, you don’t—nngh, the aim’s really not—I don’t know. Point is, I’ve come around to the lift idea.”

“Good,” Aziraphale brightened. “Let’s talk about how to tap into the security cameras.”

* * *

Gabriel stepped into the plush interior of the lift, becoming ensconced at once in inoffensive jazz. He pressed the button for DOWN.

_ Descending,  _ chimed a voice that sounded like an anaesthetized teller machine. _ Next stop Sphere One, Operations and Efficiency Initiatives. _

Gabriel tapped his earpiece. 

“Uriel, we’re going ahead with that millionfold order of San Pellegrino. Heaven is facing the largest mass casualty event in the history of the world, and by Uppermost Management, the people are going to want some seltzer when they get here.”

“I’ll order, but I'm not sure our supply chain will be intact, Gabriel. The apocalypse is expected to interfere with regular deliveries.”

“Make it happen, Uriel! Going to have several billion dead souls arriving in Heaven after we kill off every living person on Earth, and I will  _ not  _ hear of anyone being denied a refreshing glass of sparkling water upon their arrival, you hear me?”

“OK, we’ll see what we can do.” The irritation in Uriel’s voice was smoothed over, sanded down by millennia of experience with Gabriel’s well-intentioned but logistically confounding whims.

“Thanks, Uriel, appreciate it. Tell Michael to ping me when you get a chance, would you?”

“Of course.”

The earpiece quieted, and Gabriel relaxed in the cool blandness of the descent. Heaven was preparing for a population bump like nothing seen before, not through any of the great wars or greater plagues that had more-than-decimated the ranks of living humanity. In the face of such a challenge, Gabriel was paying a visit to the leaders of the Operations Team to offer what support the Archangels could provide.

It was several more measures of unobjectionable jazz before Gabriel realized he had descended far past his stop. In fact, he was more than a quarter of the way through Limbo, its featureless dreamscape undulating gently outside the glass walls of the lift.

“Whoops, don’t want to pay a visit to the basement levels—not in these shoes,” he muttered to himself.[24]

Gabriel pressed a button to arrest the descent of the lift, but it hurled downward as if nothing had happened. He took several deep and ornamental breaths with lungs he had uselessly coaxed into peak athletic performance. The music in the background, which had become tuneless static while crossing Limbo, now began again, in minor key and with notably more screams.

When the lift came to a halt, it opened upon the sulfurous gusts of Hell. 

_ Infernal Reaches, Executive Deck,  _ the lift announced.

“What in Satan’s middle name are you doing here?” Beelzebub demanded, drawing back from the panel of call buttons in alarm.

“Pleasant greetings to you too,” Gabriel said. “Clearly there’s been some kind of malfunction.” He frowned. “Don’t tell me your crew tried to clean the ventilation shafts and compromised the elevator system?”

“Very funny, Gabriel,” Beelzebub snarled. “As if Hell has ventilation.”

“Well, look, I’ve got a meeting with the Operations Team in four minutes, and punctuality is a virtue, so I’ve really got to head back up to the ol’ conference center in the sky. Sure you understand—” Gabriel reached for the DOOR CLOSE button.

“Hang on, Purple Eyes—”

“—they’re actually a violet-leaning indigo—”

“—I’ve got a two o’clock with  _ our  _ Ops Team down in Level Four, and I’m not skipping it just because you forgot which way is up. Move over.” 

And Beelzebub stepped into the lift, which thrummed uncertainly, shuddered closed, and began another descent.

It was dark enough in Hell that Gabriel couldn’t make out any of the scenery whizzing by, though whether that was due to the lack of light or the presence of a serious mold infestation was unclear. But the worsening smell made it plain they were rapidly approaching the sort of depths to which angels typically descended only in large, reluctant groups.

“Nervous, Gabriel?” Beelzebub said, staring at the display ticking off the floors.

“The forces of evil hold no terrors for the righteous.”

“Jeez, do you answer all questions like that?”

Something twisted at the edge of Gabriel’s mouth. “No, all the other times I’ve been in an elevator with a demon we’ve had long, mutually respectful discussions.”

Beelzebub turned, looking vaguely impressed. “Was that sarcasm from an Archangel? Don’t you lot get smote for that?”

Gabriel fixed Beelzebub with a look that might have been arrogance on a face less holy. “I’m not too worried about it.”

_ Fifth Circle, Mezzanine Level _ , the automated voice chirped.

“What, I didn’t press for that! That’s too far.” Beelzebub punched the button panel at random.

“I told you, it’s busted.”

The doors slid open, and a stinking cloud of poison flooded in. Duke Hastur was waiting at the entrance, and nearly dropped his clipboard when he saw Gabriel and Beelzebub standing side by side in the interior.[25]

“Hullo Hastur,” Beelzebub said. “Afraid we’ve got a bit of an angel infestation on our hands.”

“CODE CHARTREUSE!” Hastur yelled. “Highness, that’s a CODE CHARTREUSE!”

Gabriel grabbed Hastur at once by his threadbare lapels.

“What the fuck, Gabriel!” Beelzebub shouted.

“Look here, Your Disgrace, the elevator’s out of order, and believe me, nobody wants to be here less than me.” Gabriel’s voice was devoid of its usual affability. “Just get in, OK?” He released the Duke.

Hastur wobbled forward, footsteps leaving a trail of pond scum on the lift floor.

Beelzebub was scowling at Gabriel, but only pushed the button for a higher floor of Hell.

_ Now ascending to Fourth Circle. Disembark here for the Torments of the Greedy, Accounting, Operations, and General Counsel. _

“Bit on the nose, having the financial departments located on the same level where you’re torturing the sinners who succumbed to Greed,” Gabriel observed. “Don’t you think?”

Beelzebub regarded Gabriel with the same kind of look that unconvincing parents use to praise artworks in the glitter glue on pasta medium.

“Who do you think works in Accounting? Haven’t found anything more effective for making wayward hedge fund managers regret their choices in life than having them process the expense reports of our Temptations Department.”

The lift continued its upward whooshing.

The three of them stood in a perfect equilateral triangle, and no one made any further noises that might be interpreted as pleasantries. Gabriel opened his mouth, and seemed to be teetering on the brink of small talk, but he thought better of it.

_ Override Initiated _ , the lift announced.

“Who pressed that?” Beelzebub spat.

“Not me,” Gabriel said.

Hastur shook his head with vehemence, and a small spattering of grease.

_ Now ascending to Limbo. Disembark here for the infinite wastes, the endless expanses, and the Juice Junction. _

“I’ve been meaning to try that place,” Gabriel and Beelzebub muttered at the same time.

They stopped, looked at each other, and then frowned in opposite directions.

It was another minute before the lift came to a halt, or perhaps it was no time at all and the lift simply made a complicated corkscrewing maneuver and arrived instantaneously in the future. 

One thing was perfectly clear: the lift had stopped nowhere near the juice bar, and there was nothing outside its glass walls but the drifting unreality of Limbo.

They appeared to be marooned in an endless field of sand dunes. Whenever the occupants of the lift looked directly at them, the dunes seemed to shift along a different axis of direction, making it impossible to tell which way was up or down, left or right. The dunes were alternately hundreds of miles below them, undulating peacefully in parallel to the lift’s path, perched at some improbable diagonal, and looming far above like the ceiling of some crumbling cathedral. The air was everywhere filled with enormous, iridescent bubbles, which floated past in no conceivable pattern. Outside a strange noise reverberated, like a mournful kazoo against the backdrop of a million computers booting up.[26]

“Well,” Gabriel said, “this is suboptimal.”

Hastur let out a piercing screech.

“We’re TRAPPED! We’re never getting out! You bloody angel, you did this! We’re going to languish here until the Universe tastefully fades to black!”

“That’s not what that means, Hastur, and get a grip.” Beelzebub seemed to be mere seconds from smacking him across his unctuous face.

“We’re NEVER GETTING OUT!!!”

Gabriel had his hands clapped over his ears. “Would you make him stop, Highness?”

Beelzebub rounded on him, the cloud of flies around their head trembling like electrons in a state of excitation.

“What the fuck does it look like I’m trying to do, Gabriel, make him scream louder?”

“There’s no need for that kind of language, peril or no—”

“—FUCK you, Gabriel, this is the perfect time for cursing—”

“—I hope you realize being aggressive isn’t going to get us out of here—”

“I hope your wings get caught in a transmission tower, you supercilious arse,” Beelzebub growled.

Gabriel sighed, and rubbed his temples with something short of grace. 

“OK, let’s think about this predicament logically,” he offered.

“WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!” Hastur screamed.

There was a thunk, and then a sudden quiet filled only with the eerie background music of Limbo. Hastur had fainted against one transparent wall. Outside the windows of the lift, the landscape pulsed and effervesced.

“Finally,” Beelzebub whispered. “I wonder if you can revoke a dukedom.”

“We don’t have aristocracy in Heaven,” Gabriel sniffed.

“Bit rich from the crew who evangelized about the divine right of kings for a thousand odd years, don’t you think?”

Gabriel scowled.

“OK, I hate to call in favors, but I think we’re out of options,” he said, and knelt on the floor of the lift next to Hastur’s ragged, supine form.

“What are you doing?”

Gabriel closed his eyes and pressed his palms together, head bowed. 

“Oh most holy Supervisor, your humble employee beseeches you for your mercy,” he began.

“Jesus Christ,” Beelzebub groaned. 

Gabriel shook his head without opening his eyes. “He’s not on call today, I checked the shared calendar.”

“Fine, you want to pray your way out of this? I’ll put in a call to the basement levels, see all the good it does us.” They closed their eyes and balled their fists. “Satan damn this lift and all its miserable contents and pull it back to the most accursed depths of Hell—”

“—let us ascend unto the ranks of your Grace and look once more upon your blessed angels—”

“—so the sniveling angel in the broken lift might know what it is to enter the unventilated reaches—”

“—tarry not to aid us, though we be among the company of the wicked—”

There was a tremendous crunching noise, like a slag heap being devoured by an unseen maw. The lift shuddered back to life and began a swift ascent through the bubbling nowhere.

Gabriel opened his eyes. Beelzebub staggered, and trod on one of Hastur’s arms.

_ Override initiated _ , the voice burbled again. 

“Well, just goes to show you what can be accomplished if you have a little faith,” Gabriel said, springing easily back to a standing posture.

Beelzebub stared at him, momentarily bug-eyed in the colloquial sense as well as the literal.

“You think that was  _ you? _ You seriously believe you got this thing moving again with your little invocation?”

“Sure.”

“ _ I  _ did this, idiot,  _ I  _ called upon the infernal forces.”

“Well, we are going up,” Gabriel said with officious patience. 

“Just because the lift is going to dump an angel in the Upstairs conference room first…”

They trailed off, and the two stared at one another for a moment.

From the floor, Hastur gurgled back to consciousness.

“We’re moving,” he said, staring out the clear tile at clouds that became more beautiful and puffier with each passing second.

_ Now arriving in Sphere One, Operations and Efficiency Initiatives.  _

“Well, this is my stop. If I don’t see either of you before you unleash Armageddon, well, I guess I  _ won’t  _ see you later.” Gabriel straightened his scarf and exited the lift as soon as the doors widened enough for him to pass though.

“Wretched white-winged wanker,” Beelzebub murmured, and jabbed the DOOR CLOSE button with exceptional violence.

Hastur pulled himself into some approximation of an upright position. 

“Angels,” he shook his head. “Downright useless in a crisis. Get all fluttery at the first sign of trouble.”

Beelzebub stared at Hastur and pondered evil’s boundless capacity for self-deception.

* * *

“Brilliant, Aziraphale, I think we’ve got it.”

Crowley clicked to switch off the display on Aziraphale’s Mesozoic computer that had shown them the interior of the lift. 

Aziraphale frowned. “You really think that was an auspicious beginning?”

“Well, I mean, they talked, didn’t they?”

“They listened to Hastur screaming his head off.” 

Crowley threw up his hands. “Is there a finer bonding experience in this Universe, I ask you? It’s all about the common enemies. We’ve just got to follow up. You’re going to send Gabriel an invitation from one of your little apocalypse-planning committees, I’ll get someone to tell Beelzebub they’re needed topside.”

Aziraphale took a long sip of tea and stared at the bottom of the cup as though wishing it were something far stronger than a robust Darjeeling.

“Crowley you don’t think they’ve ever watched us, here on earth, do you? That was frightfully easy.”

“Nah, that would be ridiculous.”

Footnotes

21Crowley had argued that the most unlikely place would surely be a dingy nightclub full of pounding music and an atmosphere of seething iniquity, and suggested meeting at one of these for their next rendezvous, but Aziraphale, in an embarrassed tone of voice, told Crowley that while he’d visited his fair share of disreputable clubs (“Only to look after friends and acquaintances, you understand—no don’t look at me like that, Crowley!”) he’d pointedly refused to set foot in a chain bookstore since the invention of joint-stock companies.  [return to text ]

22Aziraphale had some notions on impure thoughts. As far as he was concerned, the best way to deal with them was to simply outnumber them with innocent thoughts. Whenever he felt himself ruminating on something he oughtn’t to, he would set his mind to work producing immense quantities of innocuous cerebration. Then, if among that endless caravan of reflective miscellany there were one or two fleeting ideas about vigorous lovemaking with a demon, well, what was that really, lost in the immensity of the right-minded whole?  [return to text ]

23 “Oh I’m dreadfully sorry, I was just trying to get through here—these hallways are awfully small, aren't’ they?” Aziraphale said, squeezing himself past a demon-shaped obstacle. There was hardly enough room for one person to walk through the hall, and they were smushed chest-to-chest trying to sidle through.

Crowley attempted to produce an offhand laugh, but the sound that came out was some bizarre combination of ecstasy and strangulation.

“I think my robe is caught on your ankle. I hope you don’t mind if I just bend down to unhook it? By the way, did you know there’s a pair of mongooses trailing you around the ship?” Aziraphale shimmied down and Crowley made a noise like a specific printer malfunction that would not exist for another 5,000 years.

“Drat, I do believe we may be stuck—if you could just wiggle your hips a bit, I think we might be able to break free—oh! there we go, right as rain—oh no, that’s probably such an insensitive thing to say, under the circumstances. Well, erm, do be careful, those mongooses look fairly determined.”  [return to text ]

24 At least 17 infinitudes lie between Heaven and Hell, and technically there should be no way to get up and down between them. However, the office building they share operates first on faith and second on the laws of the universe, which tend to get exasperated in the face of unyielding angelic belief and break out in loopholes. So the lift rocketed through uncountable reaches of quasi-existence with little fanfare; the sole discomfort to its passengers was the awkwardness of conversation that all lifts inevitably engender.  [return to text ]

25“The Heaven is he doing there? We can’t let him on, angel.”

“I didn’t know he was there, we had to stop it somewhere! Maybe he won’t get in.”

“Eurgh, I can’t think of anything less conducive to romance than Hastur.”

“They weren’t exactly reenacting Casablanca earlier, dear.”

“This was a stupid plan. We should’ve stuck with the windmills.”  [return to text ]

26It is generally believed that Limbo has been empty for thousands of years. This is untrue. It is everywhere strewn with dropped angel feathers. It is marred with infernal excrescences, mostly overflow from storage closets that legions of demons have been too lazy to reorganize. And if rumors Above and Below are true, if you look long and hard enough in the churning emptiness, you can find, wandering lost as Paradise itself, the haunted silhouettes of Clerical Errors.  [return to text ]


	6. Ain't Nothing But A Hellhound

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content notes for this chapter: Crowley gets injured twice in this one. It's not graphic and it's partially supernatural.

Aziraphale’s rotary phone trilled at five in the morning, rousing him from the delicate spinal surgery he was performing upon an ailing hardback. After laying down his instruments, peeling off his gloves, and steeling himself for patience with some new breed of crack-of-dawn telemarketer, he picked up the receiver.

“Hello. This is A.Z. Fell and Co., and we’re most definitely closed.”

“Angel, it’s me.” Crowley said in a soft, urgent whisper.

“Crowley? Since when are you awake at this hour?” 

“Shhh, shh, you’ve got to keep quiet. I’m outside your front door. I need you.” Crowley’s voice was low. It rumbled slightly, like a storm a half-hour distant.

Aziraphale, alarmed at the dip in emotional barometric pressure, set about closing the shutters.

“Crowley, dear, I—I am very fond of you, terribly fond, but just because we might not have much time left on Earth doesn’t mean we should do anything  _ unwise. _ ” Aziraphale stared at a woodcut on his desk, eyes fixed on the apple at the end of a tree branch, where an anatomically-medieval snake was twined, tiny mythical paws offering a bite of great-great-great-great-great-great Granny Smith.

“We can’t give in now,” he said. “Even if we’d very much like to.”

“Angel, what the  _ fuck  _ are you on about? This is really important!”

Aziraphale halted with his hand reaching for the picture. He let it fall, his ring clunked to the desk. 

“Are you not suggesting we—?”

“Holy hell, angel, what sort of creep do you think I  _ am, _ I’m not going to just slither over to your flat and phone you begging for a—”

“Well,  _ really, _ it’s not as if you’ve never called me at night saying strange things,” Aziraphale said, pouting a little.[27]

“OK, fair, but this time I haven’t been drinking, I swear. I actually need your help.”

“Alright, of course, I’m coming, one moment.” Aziraphale dropped the receiver as though it had turned into something many-legged and poisonous. He took several deep breaths, then walked briskly to the door and opened it, determined not to be disappointed by the apparent lack of seductive intent.

Crowley was standing with his phone held to his ear by one jacketed shoulder. His hands were bandaged with amateurish strips of cloth and his lip was split and bloody. Aziraphale felt suddenly cold, quite apart from the bitter November night.

“What on earth happened to you, Crowley? Who did that to your hands?”

“Hellhound,” Crowley growled, and stalked into the bookshop. Moving gingerly, he was utterly saunterless.

“Oh dear,” Aziraphale said, locking the door. “What a loathsome beast.” He hesitated. “Does that mean it’s unsupervised in Mayfair?”

Crowley had just finished laying himself prone across Aziraphale’s sofa using his elbows for leverage.

“Erm, yeah, I’ve got to retrieve it. It’s a menace, Aziraphale. Teeth of a piranha. Temper of an active volcano. Size of a breadloaf.” He sighed, a ragged and unsteady exhalation. “Only good thing is I don’t think it’s developed enough object permanence to know I still exist when cowering behind furniture.”

Aziraphale walked over to the end table next to his sofa and fretted with the edge of a lace tablecloth for a moment. 

“Can I get you anything for your hands? I suppose you tried miracling them?”

“Yep. Infernal bite, can’t be cured with miracles.”

Aziraphale’s face crumpled and he made a brief motion as if to seize one of Crowley’s wrists, but he backed away.

“I’m going to get a drink,” he announced. “Would you like something?”

Crowley grunted something inflected like assent into the tattered upholstery, and Aziraphale went to fetch two mugs of cocoa, which he heaped with marshmallows before returning to the back room.

“Angel, you’re too sweet. You know I don’t go for this sugary stuff.” Crowley eyed the marshmallows with poorly concealed avarice.

“So sorry dear,” Aziraphale said, sounding singularly unapologetic.

Crowley shuffled into a position that was, if not upright, at least a steeper angle of squiggle.

“Can’t really hold a drink,” he muttered. “Excuse my hellish manners.”

He clutched his bandaged hands to his chest and leaned over the mug, then flickered a long, inhuman tongue out to lap up the cocoa and, occasionally, to seize and devour a marshmallow with acrobatic finesse. 

Aziraphale realized that he had been staring gape-mouthed for several minutes when the bottom of his chin almost collided with his breastbone. He snapped his teeth together with a clack and cleared his throat.

“Perhaps we ought to see if we can neutralize it. I don’t think it’s fair you should have to stay in that flat with such a creature trying to maul you. Not all by yourself.”

Crowley’s face scrunched above the sunglasses region.

“What’re you saying?”

“Well, it might be kept in check with angelic powers. One never knows.”

“Or it might try to rip you to even shreddier shreds.”

Aziraphale chewed a marshmallow in consternation.

“I still think it’s worth a try. Let’s go to yours.”

One hands-free ride in the Bentley later,[28] they were walking down an avenue in Mayfair to the only flat with living flower boxes.

“Oh, I suppose I’d better open it, hadn’t I?” Aziraphale said, snapping once to let them into Crowley’s flat.

“Thanks. I  _ can  _ actually pick the lock with my tongue, but it’s a bit of a hassle.”

Aziraphale felt the earth sway, or perhaps it was only the ringing in his ears and the inexplicable sensation of heat on his face.

Crowley’s tiny, wincing steps got tinier and more tentative as he shuffled into the foyer. “Plus, with my hands all mangled, it’s a bit too easy to mix up the sigil for ‘open a door’ with the one for ‘summon an eldritch terror with a million slimy tentacles to fuck up the world like it’s a nubile schoolgirl in niche pornography.’”

“Ah, the sophisticated ambiguities of language,” Aziraphale said sarcastically. “Erm, where is the creature?”

“He’s in the bedroom,” Crowley said. “He  _ was  _ in the bedroom.”

A growl sounded, from a place that was very much not the bedroom. Several confused seconds passed in wordless panic, during which there was a variety of screaming and barking, and which left Aziraphale and Crowley clinging to each other in the dark.

_ “Ow, _ angel, you bumped some of my open cuts.”

“Oh— _ oh  _ terribly sorry dear, I didn’t mean to—let’s, erm, disentangle.”

“Right, yeah, sorry. I didn’t mean to get so wound up.”

“Really I’d say you’re rather wound  _ around _ .”

They rearranged their limbs in hushed embarrassment, looking around warily for any sign of the wayward hellpuppy.

“Do you think it actually got out?” Aziraphale asked. 

Half a second later, it jumped at him.

The hellpuppy had a fury that was remarkably similar to a scorned woman’s. Beady eyes glinted evilly, tiny claws swiped to tear into angelic flesh, jaws opened to bite hard on soft parts concealed under multiple layers of fraying velvet.

It never landed from its jump.

One quarter of a second later, an enormous snake reared forward and whacked the hellpuppy out of the air, then coiled around and around it and pulled back to strike.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale cried. “Watch out, he’s trying to—”

The little dog buried its razor-teeth in the end of the snake’s tail. There was a horrible writhing, and then a flash of light so brilliant that sleeping residents of the adjacent flats were temporarily blinded in their dreams.

Aziraphale stood with his hands outstretched, surrounded by spectacular golden brilliance that was quickly fading to a modest glimmer. The puppy was stunned. It blinked its little red eyes as if to rid itself of invisible dust specks. Crowley, human-shaped once again, was sitting on the floor looking as though he’d just been hit in the chest with an asteroid.

“Are you alright?” Aziraphale asked. His voice was strange, sonorous; it seemed to be echoing from unseen dimensions.

Crowley smiled dreamily in the wrong direction and lifted a limp hand. 

“Yeah ‘m great, angel. Never better. Why do you ask?”

Then he keeled backwards and dropped to the tile with a thud. 

“Oh, bother,” Aziraphale said. He turned and glared at the newly-docile hellhound.

“It’s your fault if I can’t get him awake within a day.”

The hellpuppy gave a disoriented yip and rolled over to expose its belly.

* * *

In a tidy cafe near Covent Garden, two angels were sitting and waiting. One of them was continually glancing at a gleaming iPhone and starting to regret his scarf in the suffocating artificial heat. The other was clutching a tape recorder from the ‘70s and starting to regret his choice of hiding place in the former’s table decoration.

Gabriel was about done waiting for his spurious meeting. Aziraphale was about the size of a bumblebee and stuffed inside a vase alongside the stem of an artificial daisy. He was determined to get good notes while Crowley convalesced.

“Gosh, someday I’m going to show Sandalphon how to use the scheduling feature and he’s going to  _ remember  _ it, darn it,” Gabriel groused to the plastic daisy.

“Well, look who flew the coop.”

Beelzebub was watching. The lack of active boils in their earthly incarnation made them look rather like the After picture to their hellish guise’s Before, but the overall effect was just as chilling. Gabriel dropped a packet of artificial sweetener in surprise.

“You keep showing up places I don’t expect to see angels,” Beelzebub said, rising from the table across from Gabriel’s and plunking down opposite him. “What’s wrong with you, got stood up for a date by one of your fellow Archassholes?”

Inside the vase, Aziraphale pressed RECORD.

“Your Highness,” Gabriel said. “I guess I should have expected your exalted presence. They do say the flies tend to collect when food is left out.”

Beelzebub made a facial movement that looked like a smile had been run through an automatic translation widget too many times.

“I should clarify,” Gabriel added, “that I regard all the Archangels as my brothers and sisters, and that I am not wasting my time before the end of the world on things like  _ going on dates. _ ”

Really, Aziraphale thought from his cramped hiding spot, if you thought about it one way, it was the perfect time.

“Some would probably say that’s the perfect time,” Beelzebub remarked, as though the thought had just drifted by them. “So what are you doing? Someone parked in a prohibited zone out there and required your personal smiting?”

Gabriel unlooped his scarf from around his neck and began to fold it with unnerving precision. “I was supposed to be meeting with the Flammable Weapons Readiness Committee about a serious matter, actually, but apparently someone goofed up the start time.”

“Idiots,” Beelzebub said, poking a salt shaker and letting it spray the table in tiny cubes. “I’d make fun of you for your staff of dopey do-gooders except the demons do the same damned thing—well, I mean, everything there is damned, but the same—oh for the devil’s sake, you get the point.”

“You were supposed to have an important Earthside meeting as well?”

Aziraphale began to fret, just a little, that the coincidence he and Crowley had engineered was a bit too coincidental.

“Well. Actually. Supposed to be talking with the Parking Violations Review Board about a repeat offender.” Beelzebub looked faintly abashed.

“Oh it’s important to get that disciplinary stuff taken care of before the end of time,” Gabriel said in utter seriousness. 

“Either way, I guess those morons couldn’t be arsed even to come up and get some buttered toast. Which, by the way—”

Beelzebub flagged down a waiter. Aziraphale heard them ordering something, but he got distracted when a spiny part of the plastic flower dug into his rotator cuff.

“Oh, uh, if you’re going to sit here with that— _ stuff _ —I should probably be off,” Gabriel said. His apologetic smile was the color of corrective fluid, and about as friendly. 

“Well I wasn’t  _ going to, _ but the prospect of watching an angel squirm is hard to pass up, must admit,” Beelzebub said, as the waiter set a plate of toast before them. 

Gabriel was losing the battle against curling his lip, and surrendered to his own repulsion. “There’s a lot I won’t miss when the world ends, and the smell of marmalade is one of those things.”

“You spent too much time undercover at that ad firm in New York, Gabriel. Americans think every fruit preserve in Britain is marmalade. Clearly this is raspberry.”

“Whatever.”

Beelzebub pointed a piece of toast in Gabriel’s direction with a serious air.

“You know, now you mentioned it, I get the impression no one’s really taken that world-ends part seriously at all. We’re a few days from the seas boiling over, and everyone’s acting like—” Beelzebub cut off, looking alarmed.

Gabriel waved dismissively. 

“Don’t worry about trade secrets, same thing’s happening up top.” He ran a hesitant finger over a fold of lilac cashmere. “I—think it’s a hard thing for any angel—or demon, perhaps—to internalize.”

Aziraphale felt a sudden swell of hope at the sound of distant sympathy in Gabriel’s voice, and a sudden stab of pain at the feeling of the plastic flower falling on his head.

“Well, I’m still looking forward to plucking all your feathers out individually and making you watch while the horde throws all your ergonomically perfect desk chairs into an active volcano.”

“Charming,” Gabriel said. “And I’m sure you’ll thoroughly enjoy it when Hell is destroyed and you’ve got to complete the Heaven Re-Entry Program. It involves a  _ lot  _ of celebrity Christmas albums.”

Aziraphale was quite sure that Crowley had been responsible for at least a dozen of those, but judging by Beelzebub’s horrified gasp, it must have been freelance work.

“Not bad,” Beelzebub admitted. “You know, sometimes I think you’re wasted as an angel. Spirit for vengeance like that, we could use you on the flipside.”

Gabriel smiled, a thin, supercilious thing. 

“Sometimes  _ your _ crew gets so invested in the punishments you dole out that I wonder if there isn’t a little thrill for the pursuit of justice.”

“No, I’m pretty sure it’s just the sadism,” Beelzebub said flatly. 

* * *

When it is very cold, many snakes enter a state known as brumation, which is like hibernation for the non-committal.

A lesser-known herpetological fact is that the same thing may occur when a snake is exposed to sufficient amounts of angelic radiance. In both cases, although they sleep for long periods of time, snakes are capable of waking up if a sudden source of warmth drops by and begins to induce alertness.

“Oh! Hello dear. Are you awake? It’s frightfully hard to tell when you sleep with your eyes open, you know.”

Crowley clawed his way out of a deep, sedimentary slumber. As he stirred he realized one of his ankles was immobilized by a flock of overstuffed pillows, and one of his arms was bound in aggressive paisley. He was bathed in bright, golden light, and seemed to have been actually bathed as well. 

“You  _ are  _ awake! Good, you can listen to my recording.”

“Wot happened? Is it still the same year?” Crowley was unsure of what answer he wanted to hear.

“Oh yes,” Aziraphale said. “You’ve only been out for six hours or so. The hellhound—”

“Where’s the beassssst?” Crowley asked, bleariness gone at once, forked tongue flaring out from his face as he attempted to sit upright. “If that trumped-up terrier ever tries to bite you again I swear I’m going Cruella DeVille on its stupid little paws.”

“The puppy is at your flat, where a rather traumatized pothos plant is keeping it  _ very  _ securely in its kennel. I don’t approve of your gardening methods but I must say your vines are remarkably obedient.”

“No thanks to you being nice to them whenever you’re there. Do you have any idea the kind of degrading obscenities I’ve had to say to them after you’ve been over?”

Aziraphale looked rather interested in the answer to this rhetorical question, but replied, “Well, I just think they deserve a little praise, that’s all.”

“They’re supposed to get one backhanded compliment every five bank holidays.” Crowley froze. “Hang on, we’re not in my flat.”

“Your powers of observation are peerless, my dear. Anyway, I had to leave that horrid dog in Mayfair when I went to look in on our bosses, so I hope you don’t mind I took you to the bookshop. And, well, cleaned you up a bit. Miraculously, of course. Mostly. You were bleeding all over some  _ very _ sought-after folios, after all.”

“Apologies. Erm, thanks for that.”

“Well, I thought it was the least I could do after you threw yourself at the hellpuppy—”

“Didn’t do it for you,” Crowley insisted abruptly. His jaw clenched. “Just—didn’t think first, that’s all.”

Aziraphale opened his mouth as if to reply, then thought better of it and reached into a pocket of his coat that had not existed a few seconds prior.

“I took notes at the cafe. I actually do think your plan might be working, there seems to be a set of...potentially fruitful common frustrations.”

Crowley looked at the sheaf of scribbled-on paper and something seemed to break in the depths of him. He took a deep breath that rattled uncomfortably at the end.

“Told you it’d come off OK, didn’t I?”

“Yes, well,” Aziraphale said, straightening the already flawless crease in his trousers, “I hardly expect they’ll retire to the country together—but I do think it’s possible they might decide to see one another again, socially.”

“Nyyuh, I don’t want the world to end,” Crowley mumbled, leaning back on the pillows. A strand of bright hair fell across his face, gleaming like a vein of copper in a stone. “I can’t believe we’re betting the whole world on one angel and demon snogging each other before an evil puppy chews up the planet.”

“Well, when you put it like that,” Aziraphale said. 

Crowley frowned. “Hope Beelzebub doesn’t put too much stock in the old saying.”

“I don’t recall any saying about an evil puppy chewing the planet.”

“No it’s not that, it’s er, different.”

“What?”

Crowley flicked a mummified hand dismissively.

“Ah, you know.”

“I really don’t.” Aziraphale produced the pout which indicated he was being unfairly deprived of a secret.

“Well, er, there’s a truism in Hell that ‘An angel’s kiss is a dreadful risk.’ Supposed to be about, you know, the dangers of exposure to benediction, but some demons take it to mean you can’t snog an angel because their tongue will burn the inside of your mouth with holy fire. Or something. I didn’t really pay attention to the specifics.”

Aziraphale looked as though he couldn’t decide whether to tut at the mention of open-mouthed kissing or to belly laugh at Crowley’s obvious discomfort. He settled on a disapproving and oddly mirthful snort.

Crowley looked up and flashed a nervous smile. 

“I might be the only known survivor. Surely there’s got to be some analogous saying in Heaven?”

“In Heaven we say ‘if you are bitten by a demon, please seek prompt miraculous attention and watch for swelling around the wound.’” 

“Your lot are no fun,” Crowley muttered, poking at the end of the sofa with the toe of his boot. “Speaking of wounds, I think I need to redo the bandage on this hand, there’s purplish stuff oozing out of it.”

“Oh, let me help you,” Aziraphale said, reaching over the armchair for a small black medical bag that looked like it had been snatched from a Victorian doctor in a well-regarded period drama.

“Nah, angel, I can do it myself. It’s bloody disgusting.”

“It can’t be more disgusting than that time you had the scallop soup on the North Sea crossing.” Aziraphale sat on the sofa where Crowley was lying more or less horizontally, his back just a few inches from Crowley’s drawn-up knee.

Crowley was about to protest that it was, indeed, more disgusting than the outcome of the scallop soup, but he looked at Aziraphale’s face and was silent, offering his own hand like an idolatrous sacrifice.

Aziraphale touched Crowley’s wrist, then pulled an unlabeled bottle from his bag. Working lightly at the bandages, he turned his body so as to obscure any view of the proceedings. A bright flash of pain erupted from Crowley’s knuckles, quickly followed by an odd sensation like his whole hand was immersed in syrup, or possibly floating somewhere entirely unconnected to the rest of him.

“What’re you doing, angel? I can’t feel my fingers anymore.”

“So much the better,” Aziraphale murmured. He retrieved a roll of clean, sterilized cloth from thin air. “Stop squirming, will you?”

He sounded irritated, but his thumb rubbed a circular stroke across the inside of Crowley’s arm with infinite gentleness.

Crowley, at once afraid that any tiny movement might disrupt the parabolic caresses of the angelic thumb, opted to stop breathing.

“That saying’s not true, is it?” Aziraphale asked a minute later, snipping at a piece of gauze.

“What?”

“The whole thing about—about angels and demons kissing?”

Crowley began to breathe again after taking an enormous gulp of air. Sensation trickled back into his freshly-bandaged hand. His forearm still rested in Aziraphale’s fleshy palm. 

“Angel, if that was true we’d have both died on what—day  _ four _ after Adam and Eve checked out of their stay?”

“Day twenty,” Aziraphale corrected with the slightest of sniffs. “For Heaven’s sake, Crowley, we didn’t lose our heads the  _ moment _ we were alone in Eden.”

“Mm, right, I forgot, we waited the  _ highly respectable _ twenty days…”

“Well, I only asked because things were very different then. I don’t think holy water existed right at the start, for instance—no one had gone about blessing the puddles and the oceans and such on Earth, of course—and I’m not certain when it was all  _ finalized _ , metaphysically speaking.” He looked at Crowley through lowered gold lashes.

“So…” Crowley seemed to be fighting for words through a thick layer of mental fog, or perhaps an even thicker layer of caution. “You’re saying you don’t think our bosses finished writing the terms and conditions for the universe before Eden was destroyed, and it’s possible that stupid Hell saying is literally true?”

“Well,” Aziraphale shrugged daintily, “one can’t be sure.”

“Hang on, what about that time in the tepidarium in Ephesus?” Crowley asked. “That was thousands of years after the Beginning.”

“That was barely more than a peck.”

“On the  _ mouth, _ maybe, but it was a lot more than a peck on the—”

“Those were still early days.” Aziraphale sat back just a little, so that Crowley’s knee fit to the curve of his back like a notch.

“There was Petersburg, after that,” Crowley said. His fingers twitched against Aziraphale’s arm, brushing the purled wool of the soft sleeve.

“It  _ was _ traditional then and there, you know,” Aziraphale said quickly.

“Not with that much tongue.”

“Crowley, it’s not that I think the saying’s true!” Aziraphale said, drawing his hand back suddenly. His hair seemed to crackle as though someone had rubbed him the wrong way against carpeting and left him to emit static. “Certainly we have a fair amount of evidence otherwise. I just—well I can’t be sure, that’s all. We can’t be sure.”

The sudden disconnection from Aziraphale’s hand seemed to jolt Crowley into comprehension. His stare turned molten, and he swallowed heavily. 

“Are you trying to—make sure?”

Aziraphale became absorbed in the hems of his cuffs. 

“It seems... _ prudent  _ to establish for certain there’s no danger,” he said to the floorboards.

When he was a snake, Crowley had access to a whole host of exotic undulating motions. Despite the presence of superfluous limbs, he replicated one of them as he sat up. As he carefully eased his ankle off the pillow pile, leaving a hopeful, Aziraphale-shaped space on the cushions next to him. 

Crowley offered. “We could. Erm. Do a safety test. If you like.”

Aziraphale’s breath hitched, and he turned to stare at Crowley.

“Only if you like, angel. If you think it’s. Y’know. Necessary.”

Aziraphale did a botched job of suppressing a smile. “Sadly I’m not sure if there’s another way to tell besides the obvious,” he said, laying a soft palm against Crowley’s cheek. 

“Right. Yeah, yep. That’s—nngh. Very unfortunate we’ll have to use that method. Heartbreaking.”

“Just once, now. Just to make sure it’s alright.” Aziraphale lifted Crowley’s injured hand and scooted closer across the cushion.

“Right, OK, course, just the one time.” Crowley was stuck somewhere in between a stammer and a whisper, and Aziraphale rescued him from his verbal predicament by sealing off his mouth with a soft kiss.

It was the barest press of flesh against flesh, a gentle glide of lips that lingered for a moment before parting. Nothing dramatic happened, nobody was scorched, there was no reaction between divinity and damnation in their salivary solvents.

There was, however, a reaction from Aziraphale, who moaned softly and cradled Crowley’s head in his hands, and another from Crowley, who issued something like a growl and kissed Aziraphale again.

One kiss turned into two and Aziraphale wrapped his arms around Crowley’s back and hugged him as close as the sling allowed. Two kisses turned to three as Crowley tried to wriggle his way onto Aziraphale’s lap. As each of them opened their mouths, three kisses dissolved into an uncountable number of the irrational variety.

Crowley leaned heavily with his unslung shoulder, pressing Aziraphale back into the sofa cushions, and the two of them grappled clumsily with each other. Minutes slipped by in the easy slide of one tongue against another. Aziraphale felt hopelessly lost and magnificently aware at the same time. Crowley’s mind was a scrolling marquee of italicized exclamation points.

A lip bite was followed by a forward lunge, which was followed by a cry of pain.

“Fuck, I shouldn’t have done that,” Crowley said, clutching at his most compromised arm. 

Aziraphale’s eyes lost their glaze instantly. “Oh dear, we’d better stop, I am so sorry, I didn’t think, well, this was a foolish risk anyway and with you hurt…”

“No, angel, it’s fine, really,” Crowley squeaked. “We can keep testing out the, er, theory thingy. Whatever it was."

Aziraphale looked dazed and puzzled for a moment, as though he had no idea how he’d ended up lying across his couch snogging an injured but very eager demon. 

“Oh, right,” he said in a very small voice. He cleared his throat. “Well, I’d say it was a successful investigation, quite satisfactory. I think I’ll just make us a cup of tea and, ah, retire upstairs.”

Crowley shrank back and huddled in the pile of pillows as though someone had just opened a door and let in the freezing cold.

“Yeah, very, conclusive. Evidence. That’s what concludes things. Very conclusive evidence.”

Aziraphale retired to the upstairs of the bookshop and Crowley settled among the cushions. Neither of them remembered the cup of tea.

Footnotes

27Crowley had once called Aziraphale at 3:30am after one of the more extravagant Unhappy Hours and spent a half hour trying to recount the entire plot of a melodramatic television program in considerable agitation. Aziraphale, misinterpreting the slurred explanation, and engaged in the meticulous frosting of a 12-layer cake, thought Crowley was trying to make some kind of love confession or a proposition for sex. Unable to decide which of these was worse, Aziraphale hung up the phone with a trembling hand and ate all twelve layers of his cake unfrosted.

Crowley had actually confessed his millennia-old love and propositioned Aziraphale for sex in a different phone call, but he’d been so drunk at the time that he’d forgotten to change out of serpent form, and had held the receiver with his curled tail while hissing unintelligibly.

“Crowley, I’m fairly certain you’ve accidentally dialed, but if you can hear me, I think you should check your refrigerator, it’s making a sound like the coolant is leaking,” Aziraphale said with a sigh. “Anyway, I’ll see you at the British Museum cafe for lunch next Thursday. Pip-pip.” And he hung up just as Crowley was getting to one of his more exciting suggestions.  [return to text ]

28“The humans have made cars that drive themselves now, you know,” Aziraphale said. “I don’t think they’re quite finished yet, but in a few decades you might pick one up.”

“Angel, if you don’t think I’m loading this car into the luxury garage on the first intergalactic holiday cruiser, you’ve lost your bloody mind,” said Crowley.  [return to text ]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're back! Thanks for sticking with this story despite it decamping for unknown regions during the month of June. At some point when I get a working laptop again I will answer all the previous comments, but please know it means so much to me and all of them have brought me joy! I hope you're staying safe and well <3


	7. Unclassified Executive Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An immense thanks to chewb for beta reading this fic!!

The air plant in Gabriel’s office was used to a certain amount of fervid prayers, most of which were about management theory. It was familiar with pacing, though generally of the kind practiced for cardiovascular betterment rather than anxiety. The air plant was accustomed to hypotheticals, to rhetorical questions it could not answer. But lately the prayers, the anxious pacing, and the posing of questions had become such ever-present features of its life on the desk that the air plant began to be seriously alarmed, and to quake down to its cellulose whenever its Archangelic boss approached.

Gabriel stared down at a list on his glowing screen, which looked exactly like the latest high-end tablets on Earth except that it was composed of ethereal matter instead of conflict minerals. The list was honest and unsatisfactory.

SITUATION, it read. 

SOCIAL ENGAGEMENTS ACCELERATING WITH ARCHENEMY.

_ Pros _

  * Better understanding of Hellish schemes
  * Not burdening team with stress about upcoming end of world (is this self-care?)
  * Enjoyment derived, unquantifiable (opportunity cost??)
  * Verbal sparring with Archenemy good for development of public speaking skills
  * Identifying lingering angelic qualities in Archenemy (intelligence, vengefulness, organized inbox) helps understand Plan for whole of Creation
  * Archenemy possessed of not entirely sub-par physical qualities



_ Cons _

  * Michael still has better intel on Hellish schemes
  * Self-care possibly of diabolic origin
  * Time probably better spent networking with existing 10 million colleagues
  * Verbal sparring with Archenemy leading to overuse of expletives
  * Distraction from SMART Goals #1-3
  * Possible attraction to Archenemy totally unprecedented in the history of celestial beings



(The air plant doubted this last one. It heard some very old rumors from a pack of zinnias.)

Gabriel exhaled brusquely and the tablet disappeared. This had the salutary effect of making his desk neater, but the contents of the list lingered in his mind, immaterial and ever-present as the power he served.

Earth was due for a rain of fireballs in less than three hours.

“Got enough time,” Gabriel muttered to the air plant. “I’ll be back in time for the Apocalypse Launch Summit, OK?”

* * *

Beelzebub faced a dilemma with their calendar.

Like many desk supplies in Hell, Beelzebub’s calendar was eldritch and ornery, prone to suddenly bleeding out and filling unsuspecting desk drawers with congealed ink. It rejected all appointments not recorded in green glitter pen for reasons as ineffable as any Plan great or small.

For once, it wasn’t the calendar’s fault.

Beelzebub’s dilemma was the private, peculiar one born of scheduling a meeting for oneself that one is not prepared to admit will actually take place.

It was all very well when Gabriel would turn up incidentally and they could have a friendly, collegial chat about topics of mutual interest. They usually stuck to safe conversational territory, such as complaints about unruly subordinates and musings on the swiftly oncoming end of time. These meetings were brief and unplanned. If they happened to recur at predictable intervals in similar places, well, there had been a lot more of what Gabriel called “cross-team parallel strategic ideation” in general since the end of the world began.[29]

But things were changing. Not just on Earth, where rumors of extra-terrestrial diplomatic outreach had increased a thousandfold and global internet searches for “pulled over by UFO” and “earth carbon budget exceeded bad?” had spiked. Things were shifting even in the static eternity of Hell. 

Beelzebub and Gabriel had actually planned to see each other socially, on _ purpose _ , to meet at the juice bar in the center of Limbo that was calmer neutral territory than the Earth they were destroying. That was simply not the sort of thing that could be entered into an infernal calendar in any type of ink, no matter how viridescent or glittering.

Beelzebub uncapped a pen, hesitated, then inscribed “Executive Time - Unclassified” onto the page.

* * *

“I just think it’s exceedingly odd we haven’t heard from either of them with so much going on,” Aziraphale declared, setting down his copy of the _ Time _ s and creasing it neatly.

“We’ve both got a meeting at the end of this week, I’m sure they’d tell us if the bloody Horsemen were going to start galloping around Greenwich,” Crowley said. His voice was low and soothing and completely undermined by his frantic pacing around the almost-empty cafe.

“But really, it seems as if the end is properly starting  _ now. _ ” Aziraphale gestured to the folded  _ Times. _ “I mean there’s torrential rain in West Africa, glaciers are melting in the Arctic, Australia has been in flames for months, and there’s quite literally a plague of locusts in the Middle East again. Why, I heard on the radio the other day that whole islands have begun slipping into the Pacific Ocean!”

Crowley shook his head, cradling his formerly-mangled arm a little. He’d replaced all his beige bandages with black ones.

“Aziraphale, you really need to stop underestimating humanity’s capacity to let a few people trash this whole place. That’s not the capital-A Apocalypse, that’s just  _ climate change _ .”

Aziraphale opened his mouth to say something about how he’d been quite aware of how awful things could get without supernatural interference,  _ thank you very much _ , then shut it. He was not exactly sure what climate change was. He believed it had something to do with the acid rain about which he’d once sent a strongly worded letter to management, and something else to do with other people less scrupulously recycling their wine bottles than he did, but beyond that his knowledge was nebulous. He did know that talking about it tended to make Crowley upset,[30] and there had been enough awkwardness between them since they’d traded kisses on the bookshop sofa.

Crowley continued, snarling. “Look, just because you haven’t looked at a newspaper in a hundred years—”

“—I look at newspapers every day!”

“—just because you haven’t looked at something other than the theater reviews and crosswords in a newspaper in a hundred years, doesn’t mean the world’s stopped going to shit all on its own.”

Aziraphale fumed and said nothing, feeling resentful and guilty at the same time.[31]

“Still,” Crowley said, halting his pacing and worrying a strand of hair instead, “I agree it’s a bit weird they haven’t been all over our backs this close to the end of...to when it all happens. And maybe those locusts are a little suspicious. Seems a bit too thematic.”

Aziraphale swirled his cocoa and Crowley bit a nail as they pondered their supervisory neglect. Usually they regarded Heaven and Hell taking a lackadaisical approach to managerial matters as an unqualified blessing (or curse, as it were). They had grown used to a wide latitude. Over the centuries, check-ins and required meetings had dwindled—in fact, oversight had shrunk so drastically that every 30 years beginning in 1700, Aziraphale and Crowley customarily took an entire year off of tempting and thwarting for the pursuit of personal projects.[32]

“I just wish we knew where we stood, that’s all,” Aziraphale said to his dregs of cocoa. 

Crowley looked up at him, mouth agape, sunglasses perfectly black and impenetrable. 

“Yeah,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be something.”

* * *

Two glasses of juice sat on a table where an angel and a demon watched the landscape fluctuate through nonsensical dimensions. Each of the glasses was glowing with bright green liquid: Gabriel’s because he had ordered the Chlorophyll-Enhanced Replenishing Cooler, and Beelzebub’s because their drink was intensely radioactive. 

Beelzebub took a thoughtful sip as over the speakers music like an underwater theremin warbled mournfully. No one worked in the juice bar. It was entirely automated, a style of casual dining that both Heaven and Hell claimed credit for. Each of the 1,573 menu items had a corresponding tiny button arrayed in a vast grid, which made the counter look like a Hollywood spaceship, or perhaps a deranged game of checkers.

“Really should have catered from this place for a few of the longer apocalypse drills,” Beelzebub muttered.

“Well, come on, it’s not like it’s going anywhere,” Gabriel said, gesturing at a blob of Limbo floating outside the panoramic window. 

“How are your mutilated plants and protein powder?” Beelzebub asked, eyeing Gabriel’s drink.

“Uh, this has been filtered through ten layers of pure quintessence,” Gabriel said. He smiled grimly at the glass and its jaunty straw. “All the mortal matter has been transmuted.”

“Oh I’m sure it’s  _ very  _ pure,” Beelzebub said. If Gabriel caught the sarcasm, he didn’t show it. 

“How is...that?”

“Not terrible,” Beelzebub said. The glass continued to glow faintly after they drained it and placed it on the laminate table. “Might try a different isotope next time.”

They were quiet for a moment, looking at the shifting void beyond the juice bar.

“You know,” Gabriel began, “upstairs we’ve run five hundred and thirty-eight trillion simulations of the final confrontation between Heaven and Hell. To see what happens.”

Neither of them were looking at one another. Gabriel was addressing his tie bar; Beelzebub picked at a boil emerging on their ankle.

“I, of course, have complete faith that we will win regardless of what the projection models say. But Heaven wins in some scenarios, obliterating Hell, and in others the forces of darkness and disorder make the whole world, well, dark and disorderly. Then there’s a tiny cluster of—outliers—in which the Second War is so all-consuming and destructive that not only is Earth destined for ruination, not only the vanquished mortal realm, but  _ everything _ , all of it.”

Beelzebub stared at the window. Not a muscle in their face twitched, but their eyes became ever so slightly more compound.

“The only thing left in those statistical anomalies is—this,” Gabriel finished. “Can you imagine?”

It was not a rhetorical question. 

The radio began a new song that neither the Archangel nor the Prince of Hell were able to identify as lo-fi cicadas.

“Guess it’s a good thing this place was put in then,” Beelzebub said after a minute of distorted, insectoid thrumming had elapsed. “That big of a disaster, someone should be around to see it.”

“Yeah,” Gabriel said, frowning slightly. “It seems right someone should bear witness.”

Outside the window, Limbo stretched incomprehensibly on.

* * *

The long-expected check-in meeting arrived, and Aziraphale found himself sitting in one of Heaven’s conference rooms underneath a lesser-known work of Giotto di Bondone, the fresco titled  _ Success is Paramount  _ he’d dutifully daubed for a mysterious violet-eyed customer.[33] He tried to quash a stammer as he delivered his report and nearly dislocated his wrist from wringing his hands. Anxiety coursed through his body and made him click his heels as though he was trying to get a nonstop flight to Kansas. 

Luckily, Gabriel seemed more distracted than Aziraphale had ever seen him. Several times he took nearly a minute to reply to his questions. During these intervals Aziraphale studied the air plant on the desk and tried to sift through memories of Crowley’s diatribes against flora to see if he could place the variety.

“Do you think we were too harsh on the sin of lust?” Gabriel asked suddenly, looking out the floor-to-ceiling window.

Aziraphale had never slept, but in that moment of panicked shock he wondered if he was having some sort of nightmare.

“I—what did you say?”

“Lust,” Gabriel said, and turned around, frowning. “It’s just—well, I’ve been reviewing the criteria for admittance, in anticipation of a big ‘ol influx, you know, when everyone perishes in fire and flood.”

“Right,” Aziraphale said faintly.

“Just seems like it’s a pretty minor offense next to some of the biggies. Hate to lose a soul to Hell just because of, well, whatever it is makes them all go—”

Aziraphale was immeasurably relieved when Gabriel abandoned his attempt at a polite hand gesture to designate lecherous activity. Unfortunately, he was still looking at Aziraphale as though he expected a reply.

“I—ah, I don’t usually comment on policy choices,” Aziraphale said, with the kind of diplomacy he had last mustered for Crowley’s mid-nineties soul patch.

Gabriel sighed and tapped his wingbeat-tracking watch with evident irritation. 

“Why are you asking me?” Aziraphale asked before he could stop himself. In the back of his mind, it occurred to him that perhaps he and Crowley had succeeded, perhaps their desperate  _ Hail Gabriel _ was not in vain. The front of his mind was still consumed in wordless horror.

“Because you’re our—oh come on, Aziraphale, you know what I’m trying to say, our—our angel of the world!” It seemed to dawn on Gabriel that he was being ridiculous.

“Well, I’m afraid I have no insight whatsoever into the matter of, erm, sexual intemperance,” Aziraphale said.

“Of course,” Gabriel said quickly. “We’ll work out the intake requirements when the earth is annihilated. Probably best not to relax standards, not good for angelic morale.” It was not at all clear he was talking about intake requirements.

* * *

“Got an important question, Crowley,” Beelzebub barked. 

Crowley lowered his gaze from the drops of foul-smelling liquid that were dribbling from the ceiling into Beelzebub’s oversized mug that read IF YOU CAN’T HANDLE ME AT MY WORST YOU CAN’T HANDLE ME.

“Right, yeah, you know I’m all about questions,” Crowley offered. He was so nervous he felt as though a million snakes were wriggling around under his clothes, instead of just the one.

“Have you ever tempted an angel?” Beelzezbub asked, picking up the mug and taking a sip. 

Crowley made a noise like someone gargling punctuation marks.

“What?”

_ “Whyareyouaskingnotthatitmatters?” _

Beelzebub gave an unconvincing shrug. “We’re facing a climactic war we lost badly last time, would be valuable to know if any of them could be corrupted. Might be able to serve as informants, might be good for bargaining. If they can be appropriately persuaded or...seduced, perhaps, it would be”—they paused and scratched thoughtfully at a welt on their nose—“strategic to know about that before the battlefield is full of righteous kilts.”

Crowley concentrated very hard for a moment on the greasy-looking droplets about to fall from the crack in the ceiling before he answered.  _ This is a positive development, _ he told himself.  _ Just don’t throw up or blurt out some truthful nonsense. _

“No, nope, I haven’t. No angel temptations from me.” It wasn’t even a lie, from a certain perspective. Crowley always felt that he was the one valiantly resisting temptation, even if Aziraphale’s temptation was largely unconscious and Crowley’s resistance was marred with a few notable slip-ups.

Beelzebub did not react, but drummed their splitting fingernails on the desk.

“But I reckon maybe a more powerful demon could do it,” Crowley offered, avoiding Beelzebub’s tessellating eyes. 

“Oh?”

“Yeah, er, I have it on some authority—not really _ direct  _ authority, mind—that angels aren’t entirely averse to having it off with, erm, sufficiently-compelling non-angels.”

The drip from the ceiling seemed to become deafening, and Crowley felt like he’d sweated at least as much liquid volume from his own palms and face and the backs of his knees as the ceiling was sweating into Beelzebub’s office before the Prince of Hell spoke again.

“Sufficiently compelling non-angels,” they said slowly, and made a small tick mark on a grubby paper. “Interesting. You can go, Crowley.”

Crowley was almost halfway up the elevator back to earth before the next drip fell into Beelzebub’s mug.

* * *

The English countryside raced by the Bentley in a long reel of grey and white like an old film. In the back, the hellpuppy whimpered in its carrier.

“Poor hideous thing,” Aziraphale said, turning around to look at its red glowing eyes. “You’re going to be released soon enough, there’s really no need for that sort of carrying on, you know.”

“Don’t talk to it,” Crowley snarled. His pale hands clenched the steering wheel as though it might make a break for the windshield. “I don’t want it to remember us. We’re going to take it to bloody Tadfield, you’re going to open the latch, and it’s going to be somebody else’s sodding problem.”

Aziraphale frowned a bit, but he turned back to the dashboard and folded his hands in his lap as if to indicate his lack of any friendly overtures towards the little hellhound.

“Speaking of problems,” he said, “I think our little matchmaking gambit may actually be, erm, picking up steam, as it were. We may need to, ah, to facilitate something a bit beyond cordiality.”

“Wot?” asked Crowley, who was fiddling with the CD drive trying to eject Vivaldi’s Sheer Heart Attack.

“I think we need to find a way for our bosses to have sex,” Aziraphale said, with the air of someone speaking scientifically about an especially gruesome parasitic infection.

“Oh right, yeah,” Crowley said, giving up on his battle against dynamite with a laser beam.

“It’s not as though we can just, erm, let them into an abandoned and rather picturesque garden.” Aziraphale’s face pinked as the Bentley turned off the motorway down a twisting road.

“Surely there’s some apocalypse stuff to oversee on earth somewhere that would lend itself to a bit of angel/demon shagging,” Crowley said.

They were both silent for a minute, perhaps in sadness that nowhere on earth seemed suitable, perhaps in embarrassment at just how many places came to mind.

“I do have an assignment this week,” Aziraphale said slowly. “I’m supposed to oversee the surfacing of the great Kraken. There might be a trip to the seashore indicated, if—if for some reason I needed managerial backup. If some diabolical power ended up delaying the beast, say.”   


“I could be diabolical.”

“And if  _ we _ each tell each of  _ them _ we need assistance before the kraken arrives, they could have a spot of beach combing,” Aziraphale said. “It’s hardly the weather for it, but there’s a pleasant sublimity in a winter shore, don’t you think? And we could find a lovely seaside bed and breakfast with a pleasant fire going and a cozy room with a large bed and—”

Aziraphale, who had been listing each possibility with more glowing elation than the last, suddenly stopped.

“I mean, obviously it doesn’t matter where  _ we  _ stay, but thinking of them, you know.”

The hellpuppy barked in what might have been disbelief.

“It’s just off the coast of Scotland. We thought it was going to turn up around Hokkaido, but that turned out to be the portal to Neptune that popped up in the Sea of Japan last Tuesday.”

“Yeah all right, we can go hang around on Kraken-monitoring duty and ask them to come down to whatever heinously cute place you’ve found on a day it’s not utterly miserable,” Crowley looked over at Aziraphale, ignoring the road and somehow veering along the correct path to Tadfield anyway.

Tadfield was also heinously cute; in the wintry quietude it looked charming and quaint, and there were a number of wholesome snowball fights breaking out in the public square. Aziraphale lugged the carrier from the Bentley to the crest of the hill they had chosen for hellhound release.

“How do you know which is the child?” Aziraphale asked. 

“Dunno, that’s for the dog to figure out,” Crowley replied. “Ah, I’m gonna just stand back if that’s alright—”

Aziraphale snapped his fingers as best he could under a thick mitten, and the carrier snapped open with a brief flash of gold. The hellpuppy trotted out on its tiny, dreadful paws. It looked at Crowley for a moment with eyes like pools of blood, or stoplights, which were about equally odious to him. Then it howled once, almost fell over with the effort, and ran down the hill into the snowy, picturesque village.

“Good fucking riddance,” Crowley snarled after it.

“You know, I think I’d rather like to have a dog one day,” Aziraphale said, and walked back towards the Bentley before Crowley could reply.

Footnotes

29Beelzebub heartily approved of Gabriel’s multi-syllabic jargon, and found it a rather endearing fault in an angel. Gabriel likewise approved of the fact that Beelzebub had once written 5,000 footnotes for a 3 page contract, never mind that proverbial drivel about devils and details. He did find the illustrations a trifle much..  [return to text ]

30Another thing he knew was that Crowley had been heavily involved in the petrochemical business in previous decades, and had four awards shaped like barrels of crude in which he grew pond lilies and illegal psychedelics. He likewise knew that said petrochemical involvement distressed the present-day Crowley so much he had once sobbed a three-hour apology to his bonsai tree after a surfeit of gin. [return to text ]

31Aziraphale was poorly informed about human affairs. He found being well-informed was increasingly distressing, and his power to intercede was increasingly diminished. Crowley sometimes sourly remarked that Aziraphale must consider keeping up with the news above his pay grade, but it was something Heavenly management itself had told him in performance reviews. [return to text ]

32Aziraphale justified this type of holiday to himself as the only reasonable approach to the problem of unlimited PTO with unwritten and unknowable rules, and Crowley justified it as petty revenge. On one occasion, they even went camping on the moon for a fortnight, although Aziraphale experienced a state of considerable nervous agitation while off-planet, and kept checking on the earth throughout their lunar excursion through his opera glasses. [return to text ]

33Not to be confused with Fra Angelico’s _Can’t Have Faith Without Faith_ or Lorenzo Ghiberti’s _Choir of Angels Espousing Best Practices_. [return to text ]


	8. Seaside Rendezvous

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A huge thanks to chewb, without whose beta-reading this would be all the wrongs kinds of nonsensical, and whose good cheer has been invaluable in this whole endeavour. We're careening towards an ending here, folks!

“All I’m saying is, would it have killed the Kraken to rise from the depths and wreak havoc off the coast of the Azores?” Crowley whined. “What was wrong with the Mozambique channel? Or Hawaii? The Society Islands?”

Outside, the rain was punishing the beach with a thousand icy lashes for the crime of being located above the 45th parallel. The beach itself looked like something long-neglected and newly-found; under the cold grey sky the small strip of sand between the rocks was as powdery and colorless as undisturbed dust. The sea roiled and surged, making swipes at the coastline with its claws of frigid water. 

There was not, at least, any sign of errant tentacles.

Aziraphale took a bite of shrimp and a sip of his whiskey sour.

“At least it isn’t raining fish right now.” He wiped his mouth with a hotel napkin. “Anyway, I think Tahiti is under attack by hostile mermaids at the moment.”

Crowley muttered something uncomplimentary about other creatures ‘trying to pull off scales.’

They were sitting at a bar in a large hotel. The decor had clearly been aiming for nautical whimsy and ended up closer to “kitschy shipwreck.” Instead of beach umbrellas, all the drinks came with tiny maritime signal flags on toothpicks.[34] The decor looked as though it had all been recently dredged out of the ocean and only minimally cleaned and de-barnacled. Perhaps that accounted for the whimsy. 

“Pity I can’t expense this to Hell,” Crowley said, changing the subject. “I think I’m four points from another Eternal Reward, but can’t exactly charge them on behalf of ‘Francis and Ashtoreth.’”

“I meant to ask you where you thought that one up,” Aziraphale said, dipping another prawn neatly in cocktail sauce. “Francis is just the name I use on the telephone and in exceptionally crowded coffeeshops.”

Crowley’s throat did the strange little movement that indicated he was about to be sincere.

“Ah, it’s my middle name, actually, ‘Ashtoreth.’ We all got issued middle names right before Hell IT started requiring security questions.” 

“I thought your middle name started with a J?” Aziraphale gave his whiskey an accusing squeeze of lemon.

“Nah, that’s just for effect. I mean, Anthony A. Crowley? That sounds ridiculous.”

“Wouldn’t want that,” Aziraphale said, retrieving another napkin from the hollowed-out lobster trap that also held the extra menus, four kinds of vinegar, and several grubby salt and pepper shakers. “I’d hate to impinge upon your demonic dignity.”

“Oh we haven’t got dignity, don’t worry. That’s reserved for more exalted creatures.” Crowley raised his pinkies and made a show of tying his scarf into a bow, tucking in the ends so it looked rather like the bedraggled, malnourished version of Aziraphale’s own bow tie.

“You dreadful fiend,” Aziraphale chided, but he was smiling as he emptied his first drink and poured himself a second. 

At Aziraphale’s insistence, they had arranged for all the staff to remember sudden emergencies elsewhere right after ordering food, to spare them from any cephalopodic wrath that might be encountered. Crowley reassured himself that this bit of altruism was balanced out by helping themselves to the contents of the hotel bar.

The TV played a weather report featuring light showers of smelt over the south of Great Britain and a 40% chance of fireballs. Crowley’s phone beeped and he fished it out of his jacket.

“Aw, that’s just disgusting,” he said, making a face at the screen.

“What?”

“Someone uploaded a picture of the Antichrist with the deathpuppy to the Hell Slack. Apparently the kid put it on TikTok.”

“There’s a Hell Slack?” 

“Course. Why, Heaven still using Morse code? Apparitions? D’you all, I dunno, inscribe memos on parchment and fly them on the literal wings of doves?”

Aziraphale shook his head. Truthfully, he suspected there were a number of group texts he was not privy to, and emails he was not copied on. He felt a twinge of sadness for a moment, thinking of the collegial friendliness he had never really enjoyed and from which he was almost certainly disqualifying himself by interfering with the Apocalypse, and stabbed at a broken ice cube in his whiskey sour with more than warranted vigor.

“Hey, you all right?” Crowley asked. 

“Yes.” Aziraphale paused for a moment, looked at the furrow of concern at the center of Crowley’s sunglasses, and realized that it was true. “Yes, I’m perfectly fine.”

“What’s our time until Kraken?”

Aziraphale frowned at an array of cocktail napkins on which he’d performed a series of incomprehensible calculations with a novelty pen shaped like a squid he’d purchased from the gift shop right before the attendant recalled that he’d left the range on at his flat.

“According to these, it should be twelve hours away.”

“So once it gets a bit closer to surfacing, I’m going to make some token effort to stop it, and you’re going to tell Gabriel Hell is interfering. Meanwhile, I’ve sent an email to Beelzebub we should harness the Kraken’s power to help win the war against Heaven, right? Then we leave as quick as possible once it happens?”

“Right,” Aziraphale said, but he was still staring at the napkins, and he looked a bit queasy.

“Hey, you really OK? Is the seafood platter bad? Hope they didn’t just pick some old fish out of the rainbarrel...”

“I could have sworn there was another part of the maths,” Aziraphale said. “I don’t see anything here that accounts for the expected dilation of reality, and I could swear I’d already done those figures...”

Crowley felt like all the blood in his body had been replaced by pure, liquid dread. He slowly pulled out the napkin beneath his Long Island Iced Tea. The ink was smeared beyond all recognition by the condensation and some spilled vodka.

“Erm, this might be it,” he said faintly.

Aziraphale’s face turned the color of the tilapia he hadn’t finished. He snapped once—the napkin wrung itself out and the ink dried into neat, cramped handwriting.

“ _ Oh.” _

“Is it bad?”

“Well, in that case, and allowing for a small amount of uncertainty, the Kraken might arrive at any—”

There was a horrible crunching sound. It was like something chewing through bones, or, as it happened, thwacking an enormous tentacle across a hotel and causing the roof to collapse. 

Aziraphale ducked as a beam of wood fell from the ceiling and the walls began to buckle. Crowley took a panicked, illogical gulp of his Long Island Iced Tea before throwing himself under the bar.

“In here, Aziraphale!”

Water dripped from the fissure in the roof and the floor began to undulate in a manner wholly incompatible with solidity. Crowley couldn’t tell whether he was trembling or whether the walls themselves were quaking in fear.

Aziraphale grabbed his hand, but instead of joining him under the bar he pulled Crowley up.

“We need to run,  _ now _ !”

A second  _ thwack _ , wetter and more dreadful than the first. Pieces of the roof clattered around them. A giant ship’s wheel mounted on the wall fell and rolled away, crashing through a long window and sending shards of glass flying.

“I think we’re going to make it!” Crowley shouted as they approached the door.

There was a moment, brief and quivering, of horrible silence.

The sickening squelch that followed was like someone plunging an enormous, clogged drain. Through the hole in the ceiling a fleshy mass appeared, and then the entire hotel was lifted from its foundation. 

Furniture slid in all directions. Aziraphale and Crowley lost hold of each other as they stumbled backwards, their wings appearing from nowhere like ineffective parachutes deployed too late.

“Oh, I don’t like this, I don’t like this at all,” Aziraphale squeaked.

“Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck,” Crowley said.

A gigantic tentacle popped through the shattered window and began groping across the floor, suctioning itself to the unstable structure.

“Perhaps it just wants a look at us,” Aziraphale said, shaking. “M-must be awfully boring, sitting in the depths of the sea waiting til doomsday.”

Then the Kraken threw the entire hotel violently into the sea.

Aziraphale heard a high-pitched scream; it might have been his own, or Crowley’s, or perhaps the sound that a falling hotel makes when it is tossed rapidly into the ocean. The waves came roaring upwards and everything was suddenly silent, the world reduced to a tumult of wings and icy water. 

Aziraphale could not remember what the universe had looked like prior to Creation, but when he tried to imagine it in odd drowsy hours, it always came out something like this: as a great churning sea of grey and white, a vast, poorly-lit emptiness in which there was no clear up or down, left or right. In a cold, hard sort of way, it was beautiful, like icebergs, or Crowley’s eerily clean kitchen.

_ Crowley. _

Dodging a piece of floating hotel, Aziraphale surfaced and spun around in the thrashing water, looking for any sign of Crowley. He could see the Kraken, half-beached along the sea cliffs, and sundry pieces of room and board, but no demon.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale shouted into the void of dark sky and darker water. There was no answer. Aziraphale’s inhuman eyes saw light gleam across the waves from scales that did not look like they belonged to any fish.

There was nothing else for it; he hoisted himself from the water and stood atop the waves. It was always a bit tricky to get the balance right, and he threw out his waterlogged wings to get a surer footing before he walked across the surface of the ocean.

Rain lashed wildly left and right, and the waves roiled as though beset by nightmares, but when Aziraphale took a step forward, the water calmed. A glowing path threaded itself across the surface of the water as a patch of clear sky opened and golden sunlight poured down like a waterfall. In a few seconds, every feather on Aziraphale’s wings was dry. 

“Right,” he said, straightening the cuffs of his coat, “Jolly good.”

A few steps forward across the glittering surface of the ocean brought him near enough to confirm that the gleam he’d seen was Crowley. A long, dark serpent wriggled in the freezing water. Then it was gone and Crowley emerged, wet and sopping and missing his sunglasses.

“You alright?” he called to Aziraphale, squinting through yellow eyes reddened by seawater.

“I might ask you the same question,” Aziraphale yelled over the storm.

“Well don’t just stand there on the ocean like a sodding Botticelli subject, help me up, you useless angel,” Crowley grumbled, which Aziraphale interpreted correctly as an expression of supreme relief and affection.

They fumbled on the unstable sea, and then Crowley was standing on Aziraphale’s patch of glowing water, holding his arms and trying not to acknowledge how very close together their faces were. Thunder rumbled from the sunny spot overhead, as if the sky was displeased about making an exception for a demon.

“Oh mind your manners,” Aziraphale said haughtily to the clouds.

“I think we need a new plan.” Crowley was definitely not staring at the tiny drops of seawater on Aziraphale’s eyelashes.

“Right,” said Aziraphale, pointedly avoiding the small pink spots on Crowley’s cheeks where his sunglasses had lately rested.

At that moment, a white shape appeared on the rain-drenched horizon. An improbable sailboat was coming closer, cresting the waves. The boat maneuvered far too well for the winds, and it seemed to be made entirely of mother-of-pearl.

“Did the Kraken give me a concussion, or is that Gabriel in a sailboat?” Crowley whispered.

“Oh no, he’s early, you’d better hide!”

It was indeed Gabriel standing on the deck of the sailboat, looking unafflicted by the winds and rain. He was wearing all white except for a lavender cardigan he’d tied over his shoulders, and carried a golden telescope.

Aziraphale lifted his wings to try to block Crowley from view, but Crowley had already transformed into a snake about the size of a jump rope and dove for cover under Aziraphale’s sweater.

“Aziraphale! Is that you?”

The sailboat halted. When Gabriel stepped forward, his boat shoes squeaked.

“Erm, yes,” Aziraphale said, trying not to flinch at the length of soaking wet snake that had just lashed itself around his middle and begun to quake in both terror and hypothermia. 

“Well c’mon in—what’s that thing the humans say when they’re in boats?—all starboard, right?”

“All  _ aboard. _ ” Aziraphale stepped into the boat with delicacy and drew his coat more snugly around him.

“This Kraken stuff is great work, seems to be right on target,” Gabriel said. Aziraphale tried to surreptitiously examine his face for any signs of reluctance or lack of enthusiasm. Were his eyes especially glassy, or did he just stare vacantly at things a lot?

“Oh yes, it’s very, erm. Very apocalyptic, I suppose.”

The distant Kraken tore a chunk of limestone from the cliff face and hurled it seaward.

Gabriel winced.

“It’s, well, it’s certainly a bit of a messy way to end the world,” Aziraphale ventured. He felt Crowley tense across his stomach.

“You look like you were having a bit of trouble walking on that water,” Gabriel said, turning to face Aziraphale, face illegible once more. “Might want to do a few laps around the Atlantic, get back into the flow.”

“While there’s still an Atlantic, eh?” Aziraphale suggested weakly. 

Gabriel’s smile flickered out.

“Right, of course, take advantage of it. Before—yeah.”

Aziraphale was doing his best to look simultaneously concerned and approving, but he was undermined by the sensation of Crowley slithering across several ticklish spots and the intense fear Gabriel might think he had contracted some sort of unspeakably gruesome parasite.

It was almost a relief when the submarine showed up.

“Oh not now,” Gabriel muttered. 

Aziraphale thought, or perhaps imagined he could hear, a small, serpentine gulp.

The submarine stretched, grey and lurking and unmistakably diabolical, under the thrashing water. Two enormous beams of sickly green light shone from its front. As it came closer to the surface, Aziraphale could see it was not floating like a normal submarine at all—it appeared to be walking on ten spindly, depthless legs across the sea floor.

“Fuck,” Aziraphale’s left wrist swore, before Crowley discreetly slithered out of the sleeve and disappeared over the edge of the boat.

“Stand close,” Gabriel said. “There are probably  _ demons _ aboard.”

As if on cue, the hatch of the submarine opened and Beelzebub stepped out, looking slightly less putrescent than usual, but much angrier.

“Should have known I’d have to deal with a couple of angels playing coast guard,” Beelzebub barked over the whipping storm. The clouds did not part and cast sunlight upon them, but something ominous bubbled around the submarine.

“Why are you here?” Gabriel yelled back.

“Got an email notification,” Beelzebub said, as if this was so obvious it was hardly worth clarifying. “One of our Earth agents let me know there might be an opportunity to get in your way, and I decided to come over a little early.”

Something that looked like a tragic piece of seaweed hauled itself up onto the submarine and collapsed. 

“Right, thanks for that one, Crowley,” Beelzebub said, looking slightly disgusted. Aziraphale, privately, thought any disgust was a bit rich for someone whose face was continually half-pustule.

“Are you interfering?” Gabriel asked, incredulous. “Are you seriously hoping to—recruit the Kraken for the upcoming war?”

Beelzebub shrugged. “I came to look around. And I mean, you lot have Leviathan, it’s only fair, really.”

A low rumble of thunder echoed across the darkened sky, like the chime of some portentous, impossible clock.

Gabriel walked to the edge of the boat and his wings appeared from nowhere. Beelzebub glared at him, and the flies surrounded them in a hostile buzz once more. Crowley looked at Aziraphale and made a short jerk with his head like he did at social gatherings when things became awkward.

Aziraphale nodded.

An enormous wave came crashing down upon all four of them. The boat rocked and steadied itself, the submarine swayed drunkenly and came to rest, and Gabriel and Beelzebub began to argue vociferously in a language Aziraphale had not heard for six thousand years. He did not stay to hear any more.

Crowley grabbed Aziraphale’s arm with more constriction than he’d displayed as an actual constrictor. Aziraphale hesitated, took his hand, and he and Crowley flew off into the storm as the Kraken seethed in the shallows and the sea raged on.

Footnote 

34 True to theme, Aziraphale’s sour came with the flag “Whiskey,” and Crowley’s Long Island Iced Tea had “Bravo” to indicate “dangerous cargo.”  [return to text ]


End file.
